Instant Creation

Sometimes I have found myself grumpy that I don’t know what I want to do next. This does not occur during the restful satisfaction that comes after a project has been completed. Whether it’s finishing a single essay like this or selling a new book, once there is no more to be done, no more questions to answer or plans to make or emails to send, I quite enjoy not actually wanting to create anything for a little while.

And I do mean wanting to create. Before the act of creating something, before I get busy discovering all the particular details I’ll need to find to call something finished, there simply is the desire to do so. First, I must recognize there is a new path I want to follow. In that moment, the desire for the new creation is complete and completely within me, even though I have not taken the first step on the new creative journey. I love this moment too, this instantaneous recognition and wanting and then having. Life feels so full, so generous, so easy without me doing anything. This is the true, great pleasure of wanting.

But it’s also nice to finish something and be content without wanting or doing, just being, just knowing something else is coming eventually, but not now, and that’s just fine too. This never lasts that long, though I make sure to enjoy it while I can. Soon enough, the new idea, the new desire, shows up, and we begin again.

Or not. Sometimes the idea arrives and I will – despite or really because of its arrival – begin complaining, saying I don’t know what I want to do next or go next. I become a little depressed, and life does not seem full or easy or generous, but complicated and unknowable. I’m a powerless spectator, wishing he could join the game he sees so many others playing.

This only ever happens – these days, anyway – when what I want involves a lot of other people and I believe that whether this thing happens or not depends almost entirely on them. I have but a small, hopeful, prayerful, whiny role to play in its final creation. If I don’t believe I have the same power to create anything in my life the way I have the power to write any story on a blank page, I will sometimes tell myself I don’t know what I want. If I can’t know that I’ll have it, why want it?

I am indeed the author of my life, but I must remember this even when I’m not writing. Just as it takes time to find the words in a sentence, so too it takes time for the pieces of whatever workshop or book or new venture to come together. But everything begins in the same place, the stories and businesses, the books and classes, all of it in me, all of it through, needing absolutely nothing but time and attention to call itself done.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com