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

All this is, of course, wishful thinking. You do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

Don’t make stuff because you want to make money—it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous—because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people—and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.”
—John Green

“No artist can work simply for results; he must also like the work of getting them.”
—Robert Farrar Capon

When there’s something I want to do in the future but don’t have time for right now, I add it to what productivity expert David Allen calls a “Someday/Maybe” list. Writer Steven Johnson does this in a single document he calls a “spark file”—every time he has an idea, he adds it to the file, and then he revisits the list every couple of months.