Listen to me read this on my podcast here.
An author I know, Emily (that’s her real name; more on her later), is a professional decision-maker. Or, put another way, she’s an artist who pays attention for a living. Awake to the world and how it moves around her, she reflects deeply, and then she writes about it. Obviously, I’m a fan.
In 2020, during the global pandemic, Emily experienced a big crisis that shook her to the core. And when life had lacked comforting rhythm in more ways than one, when the world was in free fall, and the very ground beneath her own feet felt nonexistent, she found peace in another type of rhythm— poetry, specifically, haiku. Full disclosure: Emily writes haikus as a lot of us do, not the traditional Japanese version, but a simpler English variation of the three-line poems with a 5-7-5 syllable structure, and this imperfect practice, this creative act (I was unsurprised to learn) was balancing and healing. She said, “When everything stopped and all rhythms were gone, when there was no real path to follow or clear plan to depend on, when the summer blurred right into fall without a single familiar landmark, when the kids were still schooling at home with no plan to go back to a building, when my theology was turned inside out and God was silent, this tiny ritual of writing prayer-like haikus, helped.”
Here’s one of Emily’s:
In the middle time
It’s impossible to know
How things are going.
Simple creative choice-making, lining up words in a particular order, controlling the landscape of a small canvas, singing along with your imperfect voice, shaky and vulnerable as it may be, these practices invite us into the present moments we might otherwise be too uncomfortable to inhabit. We do not create our own paths alone; there is art to keep us company.
There’s this traffic sign on a road I drive on every day. I’ve treaded this windy street in my town for years, but somehow, I just noticed the yellow and black message on my path this week. It feels kind of elaborate now that I think about it. It’s one of those signs that tells you which way the road curves. This one even has a little line explaining that another road intersects, helping you anticipate that people might be turning onto the road as you come around that corner—a visual summary of what is ahead. The speed limit, by the way, is 40 mph. Do we really need this sign? Can we not see that the road is turning to the left?
I don’t usually drive around questioning the veracity or necessity of traffic communications; I’ve just been thinking a lot about the paths we walk as artists. Specifically how we know what our unique path is, how we discern what to do and what not to do, when to pivot, when to stop, and how we know we need to make a major left turn.
Lately, I’ve been coaching artists who are either considering or in the middle of a career change or fork in the road. They often show up to our sessions with a unique kind of weariness that comes from the simultaneous extreme exertion and cautious withholding of energy. Another thing they often talk about is the tipping point where it becomes more painful to stay or stay the same than it is to leave or change, the Olympic gymnast-level contortion that they are doing to make themselves fit, to follow the script of the path they’re walking or the life they’re in— That’s something I’ve felt before. And if you are there and need a discernment companion, let me know; I’d love to come alongside you at that moment.
Standing with my clients and friends who are asking these questions: should I stay or should I go? What direction is my career heading now? Should I give up? Is this all there is? What is next? They want a map or informative sign that says, “Dangerous curve ahead, slow down!,” an answer from heaven; at certain points in our lives, we all do.
When I began sensing I no longer wanted to work as a full-time oboe professor at a university (which, if I am being completely honest, that sense came for me within a few months on the job), I not only had trouble clarifying my purpose and career goals outside of that realm, I had this heavy blanket of shame resting on my chest that I would even consider leaving a tenure track job in my field. It’s just not something you do. There’s the script. Someone is paying you to play your instrument? Say yes. Who cares if it isn’t a living wage or there’s sexism or a toxic work environment or you have to drive four hours round trip to get to said low-paying gig? (I’m not saying I experienced all of those things at my jobs, although I certainly know people who have.) Sometimes, you find yourself, in an effort maybe to make your resume make sense or quiet the reverberant voices of your parents or mentors, living a perfectly good life that is actually not in congruence with who you were made to be.
I hear my clients say things like, “I don’t want to be a sell-out” or “I’m not sure who I am without this, and yet it doesn’t feel right.” These complicated moments where we need deep discernment and a soul-level quiet to reflect and then move forward boldly, creating our path, and instead, we have noisy chatter from all sides, painfully clogging the lines between our self and our Higher Power or our self and our past and future versions of us that we are trying to invite forth. When did being an artist require us to sell our souls? To care so much about what others think of us? When did we start letting the creativity seep out of creative careers?
What scripts are holding you back from creating your own path?
What outdated and inapplicable narratives are you telling yourself about it? What would you do with your life if you weren’t so afraid?
What parts of yourself have you been ignoring, squashing down so you can stay where you are?
In her new book, How to Walk Into a Room, Emily P. Freeman taught me the script idea; she compares our lives to a set of rooms we inhabit, each room having a specific prescribed way of being or a script, that life is the work of discerning when to walk out of a room and into another. That’s our path, and no one else can walk it for us. There aren’t signposts or mapquests or gurus or books or coaches or podcasts that will tell you which way to go. There are only the tools we work to build, the muscles we strengthen, and the senses we train to trust. You’ve maybe heard the phrase, “We make the road by walking,”1 and it feels true when applied here, doesn’t it? But let me remind you that while making a road all for yourself might seem stressful, you, my Dear Artist, are a pro at making things. Artists don’t make the road by walking—by creating, we make the road.
Don’t forget that in the fast-paced world of creative entrepreneurship or artistic exploration, you are also creating your life. You do not have to be bound by the scripts of the rooms you are in; you can be creative enough to invite your roommates into a new one and/or discern that some rooms are simply no longer for you. But I want to recognize that this is hard work. I knew that when I wanted to leave university teaching for that stage in my life, the decision was clear in some senses, but the act of leaving that room was life-altering and challenging and took almost a decade. And while I won’t say I’ll never enter that room again, I will say that I have not looked back since I closed that door. Creating your path will take enormous effort, and its worth it, building a life that resonates with the person you already and the person you long to become.
Here’s a reflection exercise: look back at the paths you have already created for yourself. How did you get from your family of origin to your family of choice? You made decisions and followed your intuition one step forward at a time; you forged ahead, maybe laying yellow bricks down or throwing confetti as you walked. Or maybe along the paths of your life, as you look back, you see pieces of things you believed but changed your mind about, things you put down that you decided you could not shoulder, even things that were stripped away from you before you felt ready. Maybe someone you thought would travel near you veered right, and it was heartbreaking to see the roads diverge. Points on the path well-trodden and worn where you stood pacing for a long time. Looking back, you will see how you are already an expert at creating a path. It’s called living, and you’ve been doing it all your life.
And so what lies ahead? What questions are you asking of your creative future, and how will you know how to answer them?
Not to get too meta, but to create the path we must create. Just like Emily with the haikus, I look back on the biggest turning points in my life, and I see how the freedom and play that creativity offered gave me an opportunity to reflect and name/dream the world I longed for into existence. It was a way to know myself and the world around me, to reflect and be in the painful present moment; it was a way to feel unalone in my loneliness. And my inner artist and I, we made our own kind of room, a private space of communion with our Creator, a safe place of retreat and solitude to feel seen and known and loved. Creating work that no one will ever see, that effort was laying bricks to a new way of being, waiting for that moment where the way ahead suddenly became a little clearer. It’s the power to create something out of nothing, a poem, a picture, a purpose; within this gift of creative inspiration, we can find road signs.
So create. Crack open your life and find some time. You make time for everyone else, you make time to scroll your phone, make time for this. Not for the purposes of selling or getting ahead or being known, but for knowing and sensing and being in communion with something larger than yourself.
When we create, we create our path. The answers you seek are inside that melody, those words, that feeling of a brush in your hand.
In a letter, (another Emily) Emily Dickinson, once wrote, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.2” What if the poem is the lantern? The creative act in its truest spiritual sense lights our path; not all the way around the next corner, perhaps, maybe just a few steps ahead. We make the path by continuing to create into the dark and mysterious future.
May you know that one of the most important things you get to create is your own life; it is yours and no one else's. In that sense, we are all artists, daring to create in the face of life’s biggest questions. Let your impulse to make things you care about help you know yourself, heal the hurts you’ve suffered, and light the way for the next step and then the next. Poem by poem, the path unfolds.
Last month, a team of researchers concluded their sea expedition researching how climate change is affecting marine life covering over 20,000 square miles of ocean off the coast of Chile. The Schmidt Ocean Institute used cameras (and even a robot) to go deeper than ever to explore underwater mountains near Easter Island. What they found there was astounding. Check out this article about the expedition, which shows pictures of the discoveries of over 100 new species of marine life. Coral, lobster, and sponges, some very strange-looking underwater mountain climbers we never knew existed. The article says that according to NASA, water covers 71% of the earth’s surface, and of that vastness, 81% of the oceans and bodies of water on Earth have yet to be explored or mapped out. How about this statistic: we know more about the surface of the moon and the planet Mars than we do the global ocean floor.
And so, my question for you today is this: what if this creative path you seek is less marathon and more deep sea dive?
As we give ourselves the pep talk to keep on going, to keep creating in the face of all life’s questions and uncertainties, how would it shift your mindset to believe there was something entirely new up ahead on the path? What joy and delight to come upon something you could have never even imagined existed, that if you are just willing to go a little further, a little deeper, where once stood darkness, a sea toad smiles back.
May you embrace the ocean within you, vast and mostly unexplored. Your depths hold mysteries, fears, and strengths you have not yet been able to know, gifts that lie in wait for you, joy in the form of a very weird-looking squid, and something they call a squat lobster. It's a daunting and exhilarating journey, this creative pathfinding, this deep diving, but with each plunge into the inky darkness, may you choose to believe you will find joy on the journey, a newness of life so delightful that you couldn’t make it up if you tried.
MHE
This one, I first heard in Maggie Smith’s exquisite book You Could Make This Place Beautiful.