The One Hundred Day Creative Challenge: Day 20
Finding Time
At this time of year it’s hard enough to clean the house and shop for Christmas without finding time for creative work. Fortunately a lot of us enjoy the creativity of Christmas preparation. Whether it’s baking, wrapping or choosing presents or finding creative ways to celebrate the season, creativity rules.
As I approach the New Year I’m looking at my schedule once again and trying to fight the never-ending battle with clashing priorities that sees me often putting my creative work (writing) at the end of my to-do list.
I’ve written about my struggle with this earlier this year and while I put some things in place, some roadblocks appeared. We travelled for a couple of months, then our son got engaged and wanted to get married within five months, I had a surgery and myriad other things came along.
I really need to put some more structure into my days. I really have no excuse.
I’m into week two of recovery from surgery. I’m not allowed to drive for another few weeks and can’t walk distances or carry things so I’m confined to home and ‘light activity’. It’s fortunate that I love reading and writing and can spend hours every day doing just that.
Having others run around after me and do the housework and other chores brings home to me how much we do for others. That’s a privilege of relationship, friendship and community, but as creatives we need to set time aside. Find the time. Make the time.
We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people. Julia CameronÂ
The frustration of not getting my books finished is eating away at me. I’m going to just have to do it!
