Six Things to Wake You Up
How do you stay awake?
Creatively, that is. Alive to yourself, to the world, to the air in your lungs. To newness. To possibility and curiosity and connection.
When I’m feeling stuck, creatively and personally, I often turn to words for inspiration. Books, quotes, music, poetry, podcasts. The right words, articulated at the right moment, are great at jump-starting consciousness — they bring us back to ourselves, while at the same time nudging us forward into new territory.
And we all need it. Here’s the truth: where you’re standing, right now, is on the edge of a wild and fascinating new territory. But you’ve got to stay awake to see it.
As George Saunders says:
“Every story is different. You arrive at it with the tools from your last story, and it says, ‘No, no, no, no, no — we are all seeing through that. Don’t pull out those old tricks on me.
You go out in the world. See what it is. It’s just as fresh now as it was when you were 18. Go out there and experience it, come back in befuddled, and then try. I don’t care how old you are. Do something beautiful.’”
If you’re in need of some creative fuel to get out there, push forward, or dig deeper…I’ve got you. Here are six inspiring places to start:
- This poem by David Whyte. (“Remember the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons, whether you reach them or not.”
- These Unstuck resources from SY Partners. I fell down the rabbit hole of this site and spent way too much time clicking through all the cool, interesting, practical stuff here. Inspiring, but potentially time-sucking. You’ve been warned.
- Ira Glass’s timeless quote on persistence in creative work, in video form. This just might be the best two-minute pep talk on the internet.
- The Atlas Project, from musician Ryan O’Neal of Sleeping At Last. He chooses complex themes and explores them musically, releasing a new song each month along with a multimedia trove of insights into his process of writing and song development.
- This beautiful little book on the powers and principles that frame our universe. Somehow Carlo Rovelli makes physics read like poetry, and the lessons he unfolds about exploration and venturing into the unknown are powerful and profound.
- These words from Annie Dillard (her advice is on writing…but it’s a worthy exhortation, no matter what your creative pursuit):
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
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About the Author: Erin Rufledt helps companies develop their strategic messaging and brings it to life with visual design. She’s the founder of Luminary Lab, a communication design company that works with leaders and companies to align their vision, their brand and their marketing to win more business and clearly communicate about the work they do.
Originally published at the-reframe.com on September 22, 2017.
