Coping with times of transition
How to value neutral times between creative projects.
My husband still talks about the year he stayed up to watch the clocks go back. He believed there was a kind of magic to it that most people ignored. So, in the wee small hours, he lay in bed watching the digital minutes move forward with increasing anticipation.
1:57, 1:58. 1:59… It was coming! Soon it would happen!
1:00.
1:01…..
The disappointment, predictably was real. No one really knows what he expected and yet the experience chimes true. Time is such a big thing. How could it slip by so unobtrusively? These days he didn’t even have the anticipatory ritual of attending to every clock in the house, moving the hands manually before retiring for the night.
In fact, in our modern Western lives, there are many transition points that we let slip by unobserved, and maybe that’s a problem we should consider solving, especially when it comes to our creative transitions. Perhaps we could learn a trick from the Sinhalese New Year Festival of Aluth Auvurudda which falls in this month.
Aluth Auvurudda
The festival marks the end of a harvest period. Unlike most New Year celebrations on the Gregorian calendar which slip by on the cusp of one set second in time, Aluth Auvurudda is determined by astrological considerations. It includes 12 hours 48 minutes known as the Nonagathe or 'neutral’ period. This is the time it takes the sun to move completely across the boundary from the House of Pisces to the House of Aries, the halfway point being considered the dawn of the New Year. Nonagathe is a time, interestingly for both religious activities and the playing of traditional games.
The nature of creative transition
All people experience times of confusing transition in their lives - the entering of the ‘second half of life’ around which this newsletter is centered is certainly one such time. Creative people also see this cycle of transition reflected in the ebb and flow of their projects. One project finishes and another ought to start but doesn’t. Instead, a blank space arrives. Or more accurately, we are filled with panic, fear, self-recrimination, and the belief that we have had our best years and will never have any good ideas ever again.
I know of what I speak. I haven’t made any art in the studio for about six months. I made pieces I was proud of, that I never thought would sell, and some of which did sell even without me making any real effort to market them. It was a good note I ‘ended’ on and then I came to a halt. I had said what I had to say with that work and there was no more coming out. It was very tempting to abandon art and go off and pick up another activity instead. Because what artist doesn’t make art? The problem was that when I turned to writing instead I felt (apart from this wonderful space here) equally dry. I spent time at the keyboard on a possible project but it felt as dry as chewing on hay. It was not the way forward. Instead, I left the studio and turned to a grand house redecorating plan.
I find times like this most uncomfortable. Life is short and the temptation is to fill it with activity lest I regret not making the most of my time on earth. This is especially so given my age - there are plenty of years left yet not a full life span remaining. But that presupposes that the ‘best of my time’ is always in the doing rather than the not doing.