An Image for Keeping Faith in Your Creative Endeavour After an Interruption.
It is difficult to return to creative work after any length of the interruption. I’ve left projects for ten hours, ten days, ten years, and upon each return, I have felt acute anxiety at having left my intentions unfinished. A fear that I’ve internalized as meaning that I, too, have remained unfinished, which is an excellent immobilizer because it insinuates that you lack the wholeness to complete the challenge. Rubbish. The truth is that creative ideas don’t stop when you cease to document them. They are fluid, subconscious. They move and flow around you; they grow. Growing your thoughts, awareness, and experiences alongside an idea circulating inside you is as important as the work you must undertake to craft it into something solid.
When the anxiety of interruption rears its troublesome head, take a moment to meditate on the beetle in Walden by Henry David Thoreau. A small egg laid in a felled tree remained hidden inside the planed wood of a kitchen table. For sixty years, nobody knew it was there, then, one day, the sound of chewing could be heard inside the kitchen. Imagine waking up after many years to find yourself living inside a form as restrictive and practical as a kitchen table. It happens. It’s happened to me. It’s happened to everyone I know attempting to live a creative existence. However, on the flip side, kitchen tables are where plans are made, dinners are served, discussions are had, and so, dormant or not, your gain of experience would be immense. It is worthwhile considering that the heat of an urn, a domestic chore, caused the egg to hatch. The beetle chewed its way through the center of the table and flew out the window to freedom. Who is to say that ideas, dreams, or ordinary people’s talents are not like that beetle? It is never too late for any of us. We can always return to hibernating projects and suppressed ambitions. Think of your anxiety as the urn’s heat, your interruption as experience, and arrive at your project content in the knowledge that your idea has been developing all of this time. It will no longer be an egg. Open yourself to the possibility of a window, which is worth the perseverance it takes to chew through whatever shape you’ve found yourself in.
Wishing you love and luck.
Gret Heffernan
Gret Heffernan is the Editor-in-Chief of Backlash Press and author of The Sculptor and Dark Ansley, Book One and Two.
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