Creative Rebellion Essays: finding time

The weird thing about these times is that we feel that we simultaneously have too much time on our hands and yet have no time at all. Time is tricky. Because when we finally get through all of the things we have to do, working, taking care of the kids, buying groceries, doing the dishes, fixing the car, fixing whatever is wrong with the house, trying to work out, spending time with family and (socially-distanced) friends; we are exhausted. Oh yeah, and then there is the global pandemic. And the current political and social turmoil...

The last thing we want to do is, well, anything at all except maybe get a bowl of ice cream and watch something on TV. 

WE ARE TIRED. I GET IT. I’M TIRED TOO. 

But then I think about the passage of time. In one sense time, as they say, marches on. But in another sense, I feel I can bend time to my needs, if I center myself. Slowing down and being in the moment without worrying about anything else but the exact moment you are in actually increases your velocity. 

Not resisting what is happening in the moment actually brings you into acceptance and allows you to focus. Focus, I find, comes about from not trying too hard to focus. Just being in the moment with the task at hand and not allowing the mind to run after another distraction. After a few minutes, the mind tends to settle down and accept the task at hand. Distraction is just an automatic way for the mind to procrastinate. And it is the small bits of time you have between work and family and walking the dog that you can use to center and allow focus to appear.

Artist Ruth Asawa ((January 27, 1926 – August 5, 2013) experienced the internment camp at Rohwer, Arkansas (around 120,000 Japanese-Americans, all US citizens were sent to internment camps during World War II), went to the famous Black Mountain College where she studied with Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller, became an arts activist and created an impressive body of work, which is now being commemorated as a series of postage stamps. And she did all this during a time of male domination in the arts while being married and raising six children! In a video on ruthasawa.com, her son mentions that when she was 73 she was interviewed about the importance of using your time between things:

“...use your little bits of time. Your five minutes here, your 10 minutes there. All those moments begin to add up Learn how to use time when it is given to you.”

– Ruth Asawa (as related by her son, Paul Lanier)

Instead of doomscrolling through your phone or worrying about things you can’t control, try spending the moments between life’s demands to simply sit down with a pencil and paper. Make a goal of putting something down each day on a page – it can be a drawing or a line or two of thoughts or observations. Or it can be your most audacious aspirations or your darkest fears. It doesn’t matter because no one except you needs to see it. This is just for you. 

The brilliant polymath (musician, producer, writer, artist) Brian Eno, wrote a book years ago that impressed me called A Year with Swollen Appendices. This book was essentially a daily diary of just the day-to-day events in 1994 that happened in Eno’s life as well as his thoughts. Of course, his day-to-day included producing U2’s album, hanging out with David Bowie, and corresponding with Stewart Brand. But what is amazing about just jotting things down, is that you see how your mind thinks over time and whether you are looping on the same issues over time (if you keep bemoaning year -to-year your job or wishing you spoke Spanish, you may want to look into that). 

At first, keeping consistent with anything is hard. But it becomes habitual if you get through the resistance and just sit down and do it, whatever “it” is. For myself, this weekly essay is a commitment – this particular essay is my 50th for Linkedin and I started in November of 2019. I always initially feel that I just don’t have enough time to do it, I mean what am I going to write about that is relevant to the audience? But as a design leader, I spend a lot of time talking with my team and others throughout the week and I see and hear common themes. Themes involving aspirations, fears, elation, and exhaustion. I simply synthesize what I’m taking in and the result is what you are reading. This is my digital sketchbook of these times, reflecting what I’m hearing, what I’m being told, and what I am, in turn, feeling and thinking.

I used to have problems with context changing. I thought I needed to have the optimal workspace, the ideal art studio, and a large home library where I could be surrounded by books organized on the shelf and write uninterruptedly. Well, that didn’t happen (yet) and so I have to use what is at hand. And I have to not think about things in terms of context changing, moving from one state of mind to another. Nowadays, I will have a Zoom meeting with my team about headcount and finances and then go into the art studio (aka my converted living room) and lay down a layer of paint and then spend time with my wife before heading back to another Zoom meeting with my design team. In between all of these moving parts, I keep notes in my notebook and then I write in five and fifteen-minute increments. Like Ruth Asawa. And I only have one child, not six.

As Einstein demonstrated, time is not a constant -- it’s an illusion. But we are physically changing over time (for better or worse) and the unexpected can happen at any time; where I live in LA, it’s fires, floods and earthquakes. So, now is all there is. As you read this essay, this moment, this now is it. 

YOU HAVE TIME. JUST RELAX INTO IT. AND LET YOUR CREATIVITY COME OUT.

John

Event:

Join Albert Shum (CVP, Design at Microsoft) and myself for a FREE virtual event on achieving creativity in the new normal: Creative Rituals brought to us by Tea Leaves. It’s free. August 17th at 10 am PT. 

Podcast:

Take a listen to a conversation between the brilliant Dov Baron and myself on Dov’s Leadership and Loyalty podcast. We discuss staying creative and sane during these times. 

What I’m watching:

The Go Go’s – this documentary by Allison Ellwood covers the seminal post-punk/pop band The Go Go’s from their LA hardcore punk rock roots (yes, they were once truly punk rockers) through to their emergence as the first all-female band who write their own songs to debut at number one on the charts with their debut album (a record that still stands). Their album, Beauty and the Beat, was an amalgam of pop songs with teeth as seen in the Sergio Leone gunslinger type opening guitar riff inThis Town that simultaneously celebrated their home town while caustically taking it to task. Check it out. 

“We all know the chosen toys

Of catty girls and pretty boys

Make up that face

Jump in the race

Life's a kick in this town

Life's a kick in this town

This town is our town

It is so glamorous

Bet you'd live here if you could

And be one of us…”

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