Dynamic Simplicity

The other night I wrote a blog post about how I’m changing as a person; about how my pursuit of creative fulfilment is changing my attitude to life. It was also about how my changing attitude to life is improving my pursuit of creative fulfilment, for you can’t have one without the other. Over the course of 2012, I became tired of feeling ‘busy’ without ever striking the right balance. I accepted that to aim for success, I had to start ‘doing’ rather than ‘talking about doing’.

Do the important things, cut out the extraneous things.

It’s a long process, and one I’ve only just started. It’s a process that may never end, and will almost certainly see my thoughts and feelings change again over the coming weeks and months.

The pursuit of a ‘simpler’ life coincided with Christmas, and I felt the need to reflect on what that means. How do I communicate my changing attitude to the people around me? Society is so entrenched, particularly in the consumer ideals of Christmas, that it was a shock to suddenly find myself standing on the margins gazing in. I felt a crushing weight of guilt that suddenly my family might not know who I am. How can they, if I don’t really know who I am?

With fevered creative energy, I wrote for two hours. Smashed out 1300 words, trying to illustrate the journey I find myself on. I worried the tone was wrong or could be misinterpreted, but I read and re-read it and felt confident I’d captured that feeling of change. I’d never felt such dynamism in my writing and I hoped that would come across to the readers; I rushed it onto the blog, thinking I had achieved some sort of breakthrough.

In hindsight, it probably contained enough material for two or three separate posts. Two or three considered posts. There is a time for dynamism, but maybe not when trying to reflect. I’ve read enough good writing by other creative folk to understand that these things are better approached in a sustainable fashion, rather than going all out to achieve some instant epiphany.

So I’ve deleted what I wrote. I’m going to channel that dynamism in a different direction, and build on the sense that I want to communicate my evolving philosophy. I still think I’ve got a viewpoint and story to offer to other creatives, I just need to establish the right way of telling it. And accept that sometimes I won’t always get it right.