Starting Over - How to Find a New Beginning

Beginning Afresh

Coming to the end of the The Creative Spiral book project has pitched me once again into the creative waiting room that I find myself in every time I come to the end of a project.

Waiting rooms are strange places; in-between spaces where we are neither here nor there. You could call them the physical manifestation of a hiatus.

Now, although hiatus is a word that I use quite regularly, kind of intuiting its meaning, I thought I had better check the dictionary definition if I intend to use the word. Here is how the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it:

Hiatus: a short pause in which nothing happens or is said; or, a space where something seems to be missing.

So, back to thinking about waiting rooms. Depending on what we are waiting for, they are places where we can feel restless, bored, impatient, anxious, nervous or excited. Sometimes those emotions follow each other in rapid succession; more often than not, we experience some of them simultaneously, which makes for a very heady mix. In a doctor’s surgery impatience and anxiety are probably pretty high up the list, while waiting to board a plane to visit a loved we’re more likely to be feeling excited and restlessly impatient, and maybe a little nervous too.

In any event, waiting is often an emotionally uncomfortable place that usually leaves us feeling as though we are just wasting precious time because NOTHING IS HAPPENING!

So that covers the first part of the Merriam Webster definition. But it is the second part of the definition that particularly resonated with me at this moment in time.

All the while that I was working on the book, there were things to focus on, jobs to be completed, ideas to flesh out, nuances to consider and the words to express them to be found. Deadlines gave the days and weeks purpose. Now that the words and images have gone to press and materialised into a real, tangible object, a book,  all that need for my attention  has gone and left me feeling hollow and empty.

SOMETHING IS MISSING.

This is what happens every time I reach the end of a creative journey. I’m no longer where I was - thoroughly immersed in something that gave my days structure and purpose. Nevertheless, I have not entered into a new space with renewed focus on developing a fresh idea. The accompanying emotions are very similar to those that we can experience in those waiting rooms.

They can be difficult to navigate. Mixed in with the restlessness are the exhilaration and exhaustion at the end of a project, there’s also a degree of boredom at having nothing constructive to do, and a kind of nervous anxiety about not having something to get my teeth into.

Now that my brain has been drained and emptied after all that work, it feels blank and self doubt is starting to creep in again. All the while that I was deeply immersed in the project it was all-consuming, so there was neither the mental nor the imaginative space nor the energy to think about developing any new project ideas. But now I wonder - will I ever have another good idea; do I have any shred of creativity left in me? And yet, there is this hunger that can only be satiated by working on a new creation. Can I identify what it is that will satisfy that need?

I have to remind myself of the Tai Chi symbol of the spokes of the wheel. Or rather, of the empty spaces that exist BETWEEN the spokes, for it is they that make the wheel lighter while keeping it strong and flexible at the same time. In other words, spaces have value, we just have to learn to understand and appreciate that value. Sitting in the creative waiting room here makes me aware of that again.

In the days before smartphones, when people sat in waiting rooms they would look around. They would people watch, notice gestures and expressions and clothes, and eavesdrop on conversations. They might notice the colour of the floor tiles or the dirt on the windows or the chipped paint on the wall. They might imagine other lives and loves, and build stories in their minds about those lives and loves.

So, what I’m reminding myself of right now is that it’s time to start looking around again; to start noticing things that I was too preoccupied to see as long as I was wearing the blinkers that I needed in order keep my attention on the task in hand.

While I was working on the project I would go out for regular walks as a way of clearing my mind. My walk would take me through a small park that is at the end of my road. Now that I’m open again to new ideas I’m beginning to be more aware of what’s going on around me.

That park is a wonderfully communal place where children play and practice their football after school and elderly ladies gather in group on their sit-on walking frames to exchange memories and gossip in the evening. In the mornings there will be dog walkers exercising their pooches and mothers pushing babies and toddlers traversing it to get to the nursery on the other side. Sometimes the nearby gym runs their exercise class there in the mornings, too.

All that could be new material, but I just don’t seem to be able to escape from trees as my main source of inspiration! I’ve watched the heavily pollarded pepper trees in that park change with the seasons as I’ve walked across it each day. In spring, the bare, dark, contorted branches begin to sprout all along their length, but especially abundantly at the junctures where the most pruning took place. As the days grew longer and warmer the foliage gained pace until suddenly those bare limbs seemed to have been dressed up in carnival pom-poms and feathers at all the joints. It gives the trees a comical appearance. The grand-children say they look like furry monsters. To me they look as though they could have stepped off the set for Sesame Street, and yet they do have a real presence.

Their bare limbs seem to have been dressed up in carnival pompoms

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that there is now something to feed my creative appetite again, and for that I am grateful. It is good to have something new to focus on, especially when it’s a challenge and those trees really are presenting me with a challenge. That is partly because it has been quite a long time since I lifted a paintbrush, but also because I’m grappling with the trees’ peculiar appearance. They are both clumpy and delicate at the same time, ugly in form and yet beautiful in terms of the colour, texture and movement of the fragile foliage.

Clumpy and feathery all at the same time

Seeing them as if for the first time as I try to sketch them is helping me to understand them. Painting them, or rendering them in colour in any medium is something that I have yet to master.

Trying to understand the tree. Black and white pencil sketch

First attempts at colour rendition using oil pastels

How do you manage those empty times when you find

yourself in that creative waiting room? Do share your experiences in the comments. We can all learn from each other’s coping strategies and yours might be just the one that will resonate with someone else.