The Next Easy Step - Creative Process.

28th August 2013.

In my creative process I sometimes find myself struggling with and trying to make myself do the things that I find very hard. I feel that there is something in the culture I live in that somehow promotes this: ‘No pain, no gain’ – ‘The magic happens when you get out of your comfort zone’ etc. Personally I usually find I do better work when I look for the next easy step to take, a step that I want to do, that I feel excited about.

Sometimes it’s about finding a smaller step to take in the direction of that idea (the one I was fretting over) … that the difficulty had arisen from imagining myself too many steps ahead. Sometimes it seems most helpful if I take another step altogether … the easy step that was hovering around at the edge of my awareness, waiting for me to let go of the troublesome one and notice that it was there all the time.

Either way, I get the feeling that the next easy step is generally the most fruitful one for me to take. Yet on an emotional level I forget this all the time; I find I have to remind myself of it on an almost daily (sometimes hourly) basis.