Keep Going

Walking is good for physical, spiritual, and mental health. “No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk,” said director Ingmar Berman to his daughter, Linn Ullmann. “The demons hate it when you get out of bed. Demons hate fresh air.”

Airplane mode is not just a setting on your phone: It can be a whole way of life.
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you.”
—Anne Lamott

It is easy to assume that if only you could trade your ordinary life for a new one, all your creative problems would be solved. If only you could quit your day job, move to a hip city, rent the perfect studio, and fall in with the right gang of brilliant misfits! Then you’d really have it made.
All this is, of course, wishful thinking. You do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work. Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life.

The architect Le Corbusier spent mornings in his apartment painting and afternoons in his office practicing architecture. “Painting every morning is what allows me to be lucid every afternoon,” he said. He did everything he could to keep his two identities separate, even signing his paintings with his birth name, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. A journalist once knocked on his apartment door during painting hours and asked to speak to Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier looked him right in the eye and said, “I’m sorry, he’s not in.”

“I think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it . . . I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.”
—Willie Nelson

WHEN IN DOUBT, TIDY UP.

Note that it says “when in doubt,” not “always.” Tidying up is for when I’m stalled out or stuck. Tidying up a studio is—sorry, Ms. Kondo—not life-changing or magical. It’s just a form of productive procrastination. (Avoiding work by doing other work.)

Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca said that if you read old books, you get to add all the years the author lived onto your own life.

When you’re only interacting with like-minded people all the time, there’s less and less opportunity to be changed.

You start each work not knowing exactly where you’re going or where you’ll end up. “Art is the highest form of hope,” said painter Gerhard Richter.

Social media has turned us all into politicians. And brands. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is to be off-brand.