Distanced from the daily
Why daily practice and I aren't on speaking terms
Monday’s poem from Every Day, Luv touched on a topic that seems to be popping up a lot in my world right now—my relationship with a daily creative practice. It’s complicated.
2/2/21 The daily is so important. Whatever people choose to do. Daily run Daily meditation Daily prayer Daily joke Routine, practice, familiarity So why, then, Can daily be so hard for most things? ...
I touched on this back in December in a nerdy notebook post. But it goes beyond the tactile tools…
I don’t often refer back to previous live shows in these posts1, but my last two conversations went deep into this topic. In my January 23 conversation with KJ Nasrul, MFT, she spoke at length about the joy she has found following the daily prompts of The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad. KJ sets these prompts down in a beautiful journal that combines collage, writing, and inspiration.
This daily creative practice has set off some unexpected, but lovely, side effects for KJ, including impromptu co-working sessions with her husband, who has recently taken up sewing. She journals, he sews, sounds wonderful.
And then, this past Friday’s January 30 chat with Allegra Chapman (she/her) was pretty much entirely about regular creative practice, and how there is no one way to do it.
In fact, the reason Allegra came onto my radar in the first place was because of her blunt, compelling, and frequent writing on this topic. Allegra only dictated one absolute necessity for any writer—snacks. (Watch the full show to discover her go-to nibbles…).
So while I appreciate the fact that it's okay to not have a daily writing practice, it's okay to pick it up and put it down when you can, I'm still left with one real problem. —> I want one.
Or, rather, I want to be doing more. Much more. More promotion for my book, more writing of my next books, more writing on substack, more live events out in the world. And I want to be doing it every day.
And it goes beyond the tasks and goals themselves. I want to feel like I’m making a mark while I still can. Turning these posts, these shows, these words into fuel that can provide for my family now and down the road.
But many people — my wife included – look at what I currently do, and say that I am in fact already in a position of creative privilege. I have the privilege of carving out enough time to write one post a week and chat with someone amazing for a half hour every week. So, what's with the whining?…
Or, as KJ so wisely put it “if you miss a day, okay, you miss a day. Let's start tomorrow. Let's start again.”
❤️
Adam
Not sure why this is, since I’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing roster of guests agree to spend their Friday lunch with me. 🙂
I’m consoling myself with little rituals around writing because my capacity doesn’t exactly align with the much vaunted “consistency”. My consistency is thinner than gruel.
Adam, I think we all want to be doing more and it's one of those situations where, even when we are doing more, it never feels like enough. And that's hard. I'm in between jobs for the next two weeks and today I found myself thinking more than once, I should be doing this, or that. And I'm working at learning to not berate myself for using my down time as just that: down time.