“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
~ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
The question was difficult and I didn’t know what to say. I looked up to meet her eyes and the confusion in my face must have led her to believe that I hadn’t heard, and she asked again:
“So, who do you think is going to win X-Factor?”
I knew the question was more than it seemed. It was an appeal to end the silence that was the source of an uncomfortable tension. It was a password to a place where there are no spaces, no emptiness. A place where activity stretches out to fill all available time.
It was a request to pass our time together in uncomplicated chatter and I wanted to oblige, I really did.
I scanned my brain for anything appropriate I might say. But there was nothing.
“I don’t watch it, I’m afraid.”
She looked a little panicked at the thought of nothing to talk about and I wanted to help. I wanted to say “Have you seen the Northern Lights?” or “What do you think makes every snowflake unique?” or “Do you think animals grieve like we do?”
Deciding that kind of conversation might make her even more uncomfortable, I settled on companionable discomfort and said nothing.
Meanwhile, I have been working on a new body of work and I’ve been finding it really tough. In fact, ever since I started my business, almost three years ago, my creative output has been steadily declining.
Business is all consuming and the breaks are very short. Long enough to create more of what you’ve already created before but perhaps not long enough for the experimentation and wrong turns necessary to produce something that moves you forwards, at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself each day that I don’t find time for new work.
My inner bullshit meter was heading for the red zone and I knew there was something else at play. Could it be that it’s not really about the time available, but about something altogether different?
I was wondering about this as I was brushing my teeth this morning (ever the multitasker) and thinking about why we find it so hard to make time for the things that we really want to do. You could replace “make art” with “exercise,” “meditate,” “call a friend,” “make a wholesome, healthy dinner” (even “have an interesting conversation with a stranger”) and the experience would be just the same.
We try and try to make time for these things but still they elude us. We find ways to do two, three, four things at once, thinking it will give us more time….but somehow we end up even busier and with even less time. 24 hours seems like plenty of time to have at our disposal and yet I think many of us couldn’t accurately account for how we spent the time available yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that.
Maybe it’s about those filler conversations. Maybe even when we are alone we fill our time with the activity equivalents of those tension-reducing exchanges.
I once spent an entire weekend making a colour coded, highlighted, multi-tabbed to-do list so that I would have more time to create images. The end result? I did no creative work that weekend (highlighting doesn’t count) and the magic to do list is sitting in the bottom of a filing cabinet somewhere.
Creative work requires depth.
Calling our friends requires vulnerability.
Meditation and exercise are more painful than pleasurable in the beginning.
Far easier to switch on the TV or go shopping….or colour code your ass off.
But growth, and adventure, and life, happen in the spaces between things. Every good story demands a point of tension, because tension requires action, and action moves the story forward.
Without tension, there is nothing to move your story forward, nothing to move you any closer to where you want to be. Without tension, nothing ever happens, and we spend our lives answering emails and discussing celebrities while we wait for Godot.
I don’t know the answer to this problem. I don’t know how we manage to stop filling our time up before we have the opportunity to decide what to do with it. Perhaps it is as irritatingly straightforward as simply deciding to.
What I do know is that I would like my story to be filled with unexpected twists and unforeseen adventures and not with answering emails and highlighting to-do lists.
And I do know that if I want that life, I need to be able to live with the tension of not always knowing what to do next.
How about you? How do you want your story to turn out?