Making Time for Art (Part 1 of 4)
Lack of time (or, rather, the perceived lack of time) has always been my number-one reason (or, rather, my number-one excuse) for not writing or making art.
As it turns out, I’m not unusual. At. All.
So I’ve been thinking about the issue a lot because, although I’m still plugging away at my one-creative-act-a-day project, I’m not spending as much time as I’d like to on art. Not only that, I constantly feel behind the 8-ball on most of life and hurried and harried all the time and not really the way I want to be living and things are getting dropped left and right and — I just have to stop.
Put up my hand and say That’s it. There has to be a better way. Just because I’m a mother and an artist and a whole bunch of other things doesn’t mean I have to feel up against a wall every moment of every day.
So I stopped. I took a lot of time this week to think about — well, time. I mean, Time.
And what I came up with is that I think we do the whole time management thing wrong. We talk about streamlining and multitasking and cutting out obligations and prioritizing. And all those things work, to a degree, I guess, if you’re just kind of looking to, I don’t know, survive.
But for those who need an alternative way of living, of thinking about their very relationship to time, I suggest we start approaching time management in a different way — not in terms of tasks required of us but instead in these terms:
Having time is the proper management of priority, focus, awareness, and energy.
I’ll talk about focus, awareness, and energy in future posts. But today is all about managing priority. Not just prioritizing because, again, that is so task-oriented that you have to keep redoing it and redoing it. I’m talking about managing priority in your life.
That is: Are you doing your priorities in order — are you doing the thing that’s most important in this moment? I know it’s kind of an old-school way of looking at things, but I think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need is really useful here.
So when we’re thinking about time management, the first priority to think about is our physiological needs: Can I breathe? (If the answer is no, this obviously trumps any other priority. I mean, we can’t write a novel if we’re struggling to breathe, right?) Do I have water, food, and sleep? (I would add shelter as well.) Is my body in tune with the environment? Is it able to clean itself out? Is it getting the touch that it needs?
Then: Are my family and I safe and secure — in terms of body, resources, employment, assets? Do we feel like the rug isn’t going to get ripped out from under us if we experience a job loss, major medical bills, or our house burns down? I mean, we know there’ll be crisis and transition, sure, but are we confident that we’ll be able to get back on our feet? Do we have enough insurance?
Then: Do I experience love and belonging regularly, in healthy ways? How’s my relationship with my spouse/partner, my kids, the rest of my family? Do I have a strong social circle that knows me and supports me? Do I feel part of a larger community and feel I have a role to contribute to it?
Then: Do I value myself? Do I feel valued by others? Do I value them?
Then: Do I feel connected to a larger purpose? Do I have meaning in my life? Am I engaged in my creativity, morality, and spirituality? How so?
The thing is, for a lot of people (especially, I’m going to go out on a limb and claim, a lot of artists), the “higher level” or more evolved needs are much more fun and interesting than the earlier ones: the biology, the safety, the security. Who wants to worry about earning enough money for health insurance when you could be meditating your way to enlightenment. Am I right?
But if those more basic needs aren’t taken care of, the reach for the more evolved ones is a crap shoot at best. Maslow is not unlike the chakras: You have to strengthen the lower chakras (which correlate with safety, security, and sex — by the way!) before you can strongly balance the upper ones. You can’t fool Maslow by putting aside your need for, say, water or sleep in order to work on your self-esteem or your social life.
Similarly, if more subtly (but more relevant to this space), it’s not surprising that so many artists find it hard to make time for their art — their creative, spontaneous, self-actualized work — when they haven’t resolved issues such as security or self-value.
These things build on each other.
Maybe, for some people, it is to hard to find the time to write or make art because their lower-level needs aren’t yet taken care of. Their subtle energy is directing them toward self-care in other ways: by feeding themselves right or securing immediately-paying employment or nurturing their family life. Trying to write or paint or sing under insecure conditions is not impossible (and indeed some very eternal works of art have come out of conditions like this), but it is not very, let’s say, efficient. Which isn’t a sexy term but it’s true.
So, of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t write or make art at all before we’ve established ourselves in the lower-level areas. If we waited till everything was in order before we created, we’d never get to our creative work! But perhaps we need to look at Maslow again, for the first time since the tenth grade, to really understand what’s not secure in our lives, to understand what we’re neglecting for the sake of our art, to understand whether our priorities are really in the right place. Maybe we ought to work on things like physical health and family relationships not as a barrier to our art but as an avenue to it.
And then maybe if we gave our security and relationships and bodies and the rest of it the attention and love they need, if we focused on the critical needs that we’re currently neglecting, then maybe just maybe we would fortify ourselves in stronger and stronger ways for that space of time that, I’m sure of it, will then open up and welcome more and more of our creativity.
Next up: Managing focus.
In the meantime: Looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (above), do you see lower-level needs that you’re leaping over to get to your creative work? What might your life be like if you took care of those needs? How would your creative work be different?
In: I don't have time. · Tagged with: time, time-management
on September 26, 2010 at 12:41 am
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Oh yes! I have found this too- a had a whole 3 months where I theoretically had plenty of time to do art. Sadly at that time I was unemployed and continuously anxious about money to meet my base needs. Now that those are met (security or at least the perception of), I am suddenly finding springs of time and energy to do art.
on September 26, 2010 at 12:53 am
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