Guilt-Free Breaks

There are a lot of creative people that beat themselves up when they skip a day. If you scour the internet like I do, you probably see quite a bit of people swearing you should be doing it every day or else... Or else, what? You dissolve into futility and forget everything? You lose all ability to call yourself serious about your craft? You'll never go back to it again?

You've probably heard this too. 10,000 hours is required for mastery of anything. That's probably true to some degree, although I believe skill levels aren't something you can measure quite so neatly. Artists of all kinds are the sort to journey towards what they want out of it and 'perfection' isn't necessary to accomplish satisfaction or success. We all want to log those hours, but working overtime doesn't always offer you the quality of maximizing the effort of your discipline. Balance is just as important.

Sometimes the most amazing milestones crop up in your quest when you're not even doing the thing you're struggling to master. I woke up from a nap today with this web comic idea roaring through my head and scrambled to put it to paper before the vivid sleep-addled ideas faded away. When I went down to make coffee, I had another laugh-out-loud idea for a two panel short. I wasn't drawing, I wasn't writing. In fact, I'm often finding these revelations about my ideas when I'm not obsessed with trying to.

I didn't leap into it right away either. Today, life hit me with the realization that I hadn't made anything for my nephew's birthday. I'm one of those people that will always make handmade gifts. I didn't stop at making one for him but I also made a gift for my friend's daughter who shares his birthday. I wasn't lamenting that I wasn't working on these burning ideas. Instead, the problem solving of designing gifts was unlocking the ideas with more clarity, refining with more care than jumping in would have allowed.

Of course, there are always those days where muses won't wait. Now or never. Still, it's an unreasonable expectation to tell yourself that creative slavery is the only thing you can do to assuage the guilt. Just as you refine your craft, sometimes you need to refine the way you view the value of your time and other priorities. Sometimes jumping right in is the equivalence of a sugar high. You charge in full speed and once that inspiration is satisfied, you end up in a mute state of horror that you are completely out of steam.

There is no one way to ride the waves. Sometimes we overwork for the simple fear that the opportunity will pass. Yet, like love, I think that distance can create a yearning, the sort that turns the heat of lust into the stuff that romance is made of.

If you've been keeping up, I like to tackle my work from many different angles: methods, expectations, moods, balancing priorities. There's no reason you have to entirely sacrifice something you love or panic when it can't come first. It's there, waiting. Take measures to record your thoughts when you can only spare moments. Even when I was working as a cashier, I kept a notebook handy to jot down thoughts or scribble out pictures. 

You won't always get to dedicate all of the time to your craft that you think you need to or just really want to. See those as opportunities to let your brain off the leash and see where things go. Court your thoughts a bit but don't spook your brain into paralysis. There is a reason so many artists are drawn to activities like yoga, meditation, or playing mindless card games. Excessive stress and demand can work against you. Always sacrificing sleep will catch up with you. It can be incredibly healing to do something monotonous or repetitive to help clear away the junk. You're not going to empty your brain, but you will gain the ability to attain some guilt-free breaks that do far more for helping you progress than cracking the whip.