Spontaneous Joy as a Catalyst for Better Creativity
A nostalgic trip brings back old memories and new revelations.
Last week our family flew from New York to Los Angeles to visit my parents and to get some much-needed sunshine during my daughter Marlow’s winter break. (Ironically, it poured rain the last two days we were there.) My dad, the artist and actor Russ Tamblyn, is eighty-eight years old, and if losing Jack Hirschman taught me anything, it’s that life is precious and memories even more so. I want Marlow to have as many memories as possible with her grandpa, though the ability to plan these cross-country trips ahead of time is at odds with the flexibility working artists need to maintain.
I’ve always had a hard time justifying doing anything other than work on weekdays. As a self-employed writer, director, and occasional actress, I make my own hours and can be extra hard on myself about how those hours are spent. I’ve always told myself I’m at my best when I’m on someone else’s schedule, shooting a TV show or writing on a deadline; It’s this external pressure that helps me to differentiate between what’s considered work time and what’s considered my time. Work time is something others inflict on me! Everything else I get to claim as my own.
But when I’m not working at someone else’s pace—when I’m in the timeline of creating and wondering and daydreaming and thinking about what my next project might look like—that is when my anxiety about time (and what I should be doing with it) rears its not-so-pretty head. You can’t go do something fun in the middle of the day on a Wednesday! You have to get a paying job! You have to be tied to your computer until you do!
Of course, it’s true: a job does matter because paying my mortgage matters. I also know it’s an extreme privilege to be able to frequently work from home and to know that I’ll be okay floating between paychecks if and when I need to. This is part of the freelancer life I signed up for after all. A life of: OMG a check!!! OMG no check for . . . months. OMG a check again!!! It all reinforces the belief that if I’m to be as successful as everyone else, that I should—must—structure my work week like everyone else does too. If I’m not getting paid, either for work I'm doing or about to do, then I better spend every last waking hour trying to find the next job.
I've struggled with this paradox: I know that I need spontaneous joy in my life to create as an artist. I also know that I have a tendency to deny myself spontaneous joy as some kind of self-inflicted punishment for not having a paying job.