How Do I Turn This Wheel?

For the last couple weeks I’ve been stewing in restlessness – a lot of ideas about where I’m going next and what I’m doing next, and feeling itchy because I want to feel like I’m making progress to it. So it’s time to figure the next thing out.

First stop is my current biome. Already covered that I want to trade in the plains and deserts for forests, but haven’t touched on the people yet. I have a history of finding this section of country and kin abrasive, so I’m predisposed; it’s better than it was, at least there isn’t a lot of church talk flying around anymore. Nowadays I just feel isolated – with the exception of one good friend, I don’t live the life of anyone else out here. Kin are all paired off and with kids, and my pursuit of freedom is proving pretty incompatible with their lifestyle. I don’t enjoy third-wheeling the family life, and as time goes on there are less and less opportunities for people to overlap with mine.

Put another way, I have a growing warmth in my chest when I daydream about what lays in store – woods, workshops, projects and freedom – and my current life, biome, and kin detract from that warmth. They have no overlap with it. There are times when it’s low-impact to mesh with their lifestyles, but other times it’s difficult and downright awkward. Abrasive. Tiny petty dramas and judgements suck, and the looks when I bail early or suggest something in my wheelhouse are tiresome.

Not to say that I want to sever all ties and never speak to any of them again, mind – kids will grow up and parents will have free time again, as we get older all of this will become less important. It’ll all come around. But right now, in the midst of trying to figure my shit out, these interactions are a chore at best. At the very least I want more friends that live my life, where we understand key parts of each other and have more than crumbs to bond over – and time to give to each other. Friendship that fosters freedom. I’m not going to gain any of that by hanging around here and getting assimilated into parent life.

So with those coals under my feet, and a dream of where I’m going next, I’m getting really antsy to be moving on – or at least feel like I’m moving on. That same restless cycle from last time. Part of the obstacle here is just me being impatient – it’s going to be years before any of this manifests in something truly satisfying, and I need to be exploring ways to hold myself over. Which I am – writing, collecting tools and starting projects, and slowly accumulating definition for what I do and don’t want.

There’s one thing in particular that needs confronting though, one obstacle that’s becoming unacceptably stubborn. I’m not really sure what to call it, but it’s my withering of spirit and inability to put passion toward the things I want to do. Maybe writer’s block / crafter’s block? This isn’t a recent thing. I’d call it procrastination or laziness, but that implies the solution is just to knuckle down and have discipline – 15 years of failure proves that’s incorrect. I have a picture in my head of me writing, building, crafting with passion and happiness, and whenever I sit down to try to make it happen, nothing comes out. What do you call that? Eh, probably depression.

Like I said, I don’t think discipline and diligence are the solution here – even if they did work, they’d just turn something that’s supposed to be fulfilling into a chore, a duty, a burden. Rather, I think the solution here is a change in mindset. I want to finally foster a creative side of me, and love the things I put into the world – and all I’m doing to attempt that is sitting at my desk and trying to force it out. Squeeze it out of my brain like a tube of toothpaste. I

I recently heard someone talking about how they write their songs – that they didn’t really like their work until they took regiment away from it. Instead of setting aside time to sit down and hammer something out, you relax and focus on putting yourself in a creative and imaginative state where things come out of you. Authors say they don’t come up with stories, the ideas are already there and they just listen. I used to think that was a bunch of poetic hooey, because how can you have a craft without hard work? You can do anything with enough determination, right? Well, I’m revisiting their idea and understanding what they actually mean by it, and finding new merit as a result.

On a related note, as I’m exploring this idea, it occurrs to me that this particular creative process is founded on self-love and self-respect – at least, I can’t imagine having an emotional landscape free to generate ideas without a positive opinion of yourself. How can anything spring out of a space you view as barren and gray? What’s interesting is I’m pursuing this process as a way of fostering green in myself, but to achieve this process is to already feel green. Does this make it redundant, unnecessary? Am I not going to be creative after all?

No, if anything I think this hints at the true nature of that process. It’s not a thing to be used for an outcome, not an item of purpose. In the mindset where I’m already happy and don’t need to be creatie to feel that way, all that would be left is expression – I picture a thing that brings fire to my soul, or joy, or sadness, and I bring it into the world. Which, I guess would bring me happiness in a way. It might be a mistake to think of this in terms of cause-and-effect – it more seems like a feedback loop. A technique wherein being happy perpetuates my happiness.

That’s pretty confusing and abstract, and is all speculation anyway. I’m still here, waiting for about a dozen things to resolve over the next couple years, and struggling to rewrite my creative process in the meantime. Waiting, waiting, always waiting. How do I go about fixing my process in the short term? My mindset and habits are my biggest enemy right now – I should probably start taking bites out of those.

I may also want to do something about my house – blank walls don’t go very far toward making one feel green.