Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn’t a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day.
~Rob B./Freewill Astrology
It may be the case that expensive cities are killing creativity, but I suspect the real culprit is the belief that you have to live in a certain sort of place in order to create.
If you want to have time to make your art, it helps to live somewhere that offers low overhead. Cheap rent, or — imagine it! — an affordable mortgage, in a place that’s reasonably well-tended and feels safe. Because chances are it isn’t the city that’s killing your creativity, it’s the amount of money it costs to live there and the amount of time you have to spend acquiring that money. Scarcity — insufficient time, inadequate funds — is the real creativity-killer.
Maybe going home to your “dying” hometown — or some reasonable facsimile thereof — will serve your creativity in ways you can’t imagine from where you are right now.
Validation: I am a Maker. What about you?
The co-op had some great oranges this week. Sweet and juicy and altogether perfect. Sometimes one is all I need to feel really happy. Sometimes, it takes two.
Paul Jarvis asks, Am I presently happy or do I assume I’ll be happier in the future, and if so, why?
Good question(s).
My friend Mychele is a long-time a practioner of kundalini yoga. It was she who introduced me to the phrase “ambrosial hour,” which I immediately loved.
The Sikh expression is Amrit Vela, (“nectar time”), an altogether lovely concept, and practice, especially for those who awaken at three or four a.m. and wonder wtf.
Bonus Rives: Museum of Four in the Morning.
(via swissmiss)
I have several alternative lives that exist only in my head. (“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”)
In one, I am like Bryan & Jen, who live a nomadic life, build lovely things, and share the details on their blog. They’re living on a boat now. Am I envious?
Maybe a little.
Oliver Burkeman says cut yourself some.
