Have you ever had this experience?

 

You set aside all your tasks, get yourself out of the house, go somewhere beautiful, and give yourself two hours to be creative. To write something, make something.  To do the thing that you've been dreaming about on the train to work. To bring to life all those ideas you had in the shower on days when you didn't have time to stop.

 

You get there, you sit down, you pull out your notebook: 

 

Nothing. Nada. Zero. Tumbleweed. Silence.

 

It feels like a disaster. We don’t put it in so many words, but we live in a culture that encourages us to see ourselves as productivity machines. And if you’re a machine that’s forgotten how to make things, then what’s the point of you? Perhaps you’re broken. Perhaps you may be up for the scrap heap. 

 

It’s an unkind thought, but most of us have it.

 

It’s also a lie.

 

You’re not a creativity machine. Creating art is not about how many widgets you can make in a week. It’s something much more like a relationship. The value of what we make does not depend on the number of words we produce per minute or day, or even the quality of them. It has to do with connection. Sure, we hope to produce something good in the end, but when you turn up to the page, you are primarily turning up to engage in a relationship with your creativity. If you do create something, and it makes its way out into the world, then it’s this relationship that resonates with people. 

 

The poems, songs and stories that I love most are the ones where someone has put their finger on something that resonated with me. The human response to art tends to be something like “Wow, I never saw it that way,” or “Wow, me too! I’m not alone!”, not “Wow that was efficiently done!”

 

It’s about relationship. But, like all relationships, your relationship with creativity will go through seasons of stillness. That’s unnerving, but it’s healthy and it’s necessary. Your creativity is not a malfunctioning machine that needs a service. It’s a feral child living in the woods, and it needs you to turn up regularly and feed it frazzle sandwiches, sometimes for months, before it will be ready to sit down and sing songs with you. 

 

So, if you’ve done all the right things, if you’re sitting in the woods, watching the birds, breathing deeply, forgetting your agendas and patiently waiting for creativity to cartwheel between the saplings and drop a beautiful poem onto your page, and nothing comes:

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It’s okay.

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It’s part of the process. Like any relationship, your relationship with creativity will have quiet patches. There will be moments of fun and creativity, and moments when neither of you says a word and you simply sit together watching the birds.

That isn’t wasted time. It isn’t the end. Actually, those are often some of the best times. 

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You’re not just there to produce. You’re there to learn to know each other better. And if that’s the point, then a couple of hours watching the sunrise together isn’t a bad place to start.