Creativity as rest

Sometimes making art is just the right way to fill our cup.

When you’re going through a difficult time, do you find yourself turning toward your art? What about when you’ve had a fun yet exhausting day? Or when life itself is perfectly fine, but you feel strangely unfulfilled in a creative way?

I’ve been having just a bit of a challenging time lately. It’s nothing catastrophic, but it’s noticeable. The weight of what the world is going through sometimes feels like too much. Some of my loved ones are enduring rough patches, and I care for them deeply, so I feel a bit of their pain, too. And I suspect I’m going through a growth period in my life, in which I’m recalibrating what my priorities are, what really matters to me, and who I want to be. Together, these things are heavy, and on a bad day, they feel nearly unmanageable.

Yet I keep turning toward my creative work. It isn’t intentional. It’s just a convenient escape: the fictional world of my novella or the theoretical space in which my essays exist are reprieves from real life, which is comparatively messy and full of errands and stubbed toes and bad news (of the micro and macro varieties). When I’m writing, it feels as though the rest of the world is paused, and I leave the page feeling fulfilled in a way that (temporarily, at least) expands my personal window of tolerance.

When I went to write the above paragraph, I initially worded it as: “I’ve been producing more creative work than ever before.” But that goes against why I’m writing this issue in the first place. For me, creativity lately has been about rest, not productivity. I feel proud of myself when I see that my novella’s word count has ticked up, sure, and the satisfaction of finishing a piece still hits like a drug. But that’s not the goal right now. The goal is to sink into a space in which I can focus on one thing at a time, and to make that one thing something I enjoy and feel good at.

Modern psychologists believe there are seven forms of rest: physical, mental, sensory, emotional, social, spiritual, and creative. Depending on who we are and what our lives are like, some of us may require more of a particular type of rest than others. I’m not a spiritual person, so spiritual rest is virtually unnecessary for me, but I’m easily overstimulated and often find myself in need of sensory rest. And while I love social activities, I find myself getting a bit cranky with loved ones when I haven’t had enough time with myself, AKA my preferred form of social rest. Creative rest, then, is both a way to fulfill our needs as artists and a way for us to take a break from the rest of life, however short.

As someone who finds creativity restorative and not draining, the inclusion of creative rest among these seven forms feels validating. It also makes me wonder what creative rest might look like in different contexts.

In Refuse to Be Done, one of my favorite books on craft, Matt Bell argues that there are two types of time: creative time and the life that happens in between. Creative time isn’t just the time we spend actually creating; it’s also the time we spend visiting museums, reading books, watching films, or otherwise filling our creative brains with inspiration and ideas and instruction between projects. This time is just as important as the time we spend pursuing conventional rest, like sinking into a bubble bath or taking a long nap, because it allows our creative brains to flourish later without being productive in the moment.

Sometimes, the ideal form of creative rest is strolling through the park, taking note of specifics—the way a particular bird fights with its foe, or the music playing at a child’s birthday party—to use in your story later on. Other times, creative rest looks like sitting down and writing (or coding, painting, sewing, etc) the damn thing. Sometimes it looks like doing nothing at all. Regardless, sometimes we find our cup a bit light—and creativity is just the right thing to fill it.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Just like practically everyone else, Challengers has been on my mind since my partner and I went to see it. The way this film carried and built tension from the beginning to the end is truly awe-inspiring, and the score is incredible—I listened to it on the stairmaster the other day, and it’s become a go-to playlist in the car.

✰ The Animal Dialogues by Craig Childs. (If you know me personally, pretend you haven’t already heard me rave about this.) Not only does Childs chronicle some truly incredible experiences among wildlife, but he does so with a humble reverence for nature that I resonate with and respect. Childs also has a grasp of metaphor that I can only hope to come close to achieving in my lifetime.

✰ 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. I thought this book was fiction when I first heard about it, but now that I know it’s a fragment of Hanff’s real life, I’m even more charmed by the story. I’ve really been enjoying epistolary stories lately, and knowing that Hanff had such a sweet relationship with her fellow book-lovers across the pond is super heartwarming.