293. Whatever Must Happen

Every day she takes a short walk to get coffee at the local shop. Every day she spends an hour doing yoga. Every day she eats a lunch involving a sandwich, eggs and rice, or leftover soup. Every day she watches videos about artists making art. Every day she takes half an hour to write down her thoughts and feelings in her journal. Every day she reads for an hour before going to sleep.

She can see that a problem is developing. Her life is becoming too regimented and orderly. This almost certainly makes her more productive, but what is she producing? She feels like she’s doing things for the sake of doing them rather than because they’re meaningful or beautiful or true. And how does that help her become a better artist?

Her life has become a habit, a practice that she merely repeats day after day. She’s skeptical of this because she’s skeptical of all habits. She doesn’t think they’re good, outside of things like getting regular exercise or brushing her teeth. She doesn’t want to be dominated by repetition. She wants creativity. She wants imagination. She wants novelty.

Her habits are turning her into a machine, and the last thing she wants to be is a machine. A machine does the same thing over and over again, and what is the point of that for a human being who desperately needs to make art? To be creative, she needs to live creatively too. She needs to open herself up to imagination and risk.

She cannot allow herself to do today what she did yesterday. She has to create space for something different to arise. She has to set herself free again. It’s when she’s free that she has the best ideas and creates her best art. She knows she needs to make changes, and she needs to make them immediately.

But what changes should she make? She doesn’t know and this worries her, until finally she realizes that this is the wrong question to ask. There’s no pattern to follow, no “should” to guide her. She simply needs to allow herself to be, and whatever must happen will happen.