All at sea
Why creative work feels different every time
I’m exhausted from swimming in the lake near our house in Switzerland.
On really hot days we go early in the morning when the steps leading into the water are still in shadow. We sit by the water, a gorgeous green in the mornings, watching the ducks and chatting, and then jump in before the day really gets going.
Sometimes we’ll go in the middle of the day, and it’s a completely different experience. the sun shines directly down, the water’s choppy from the passenger ferries and all the little boats. We’re in and out and then straight home, because it’s too hot to linger.
And then in the late evening, when the sun is low in the sky, we’ll slide in once more. This time, it’s as if we’re floating in the night sky, the water a dark, dark blue, the long weeds catching at our toes.
If there’s one thing I know about my beloved Lake Zurich, it’s that it’s different each time: the light, the colour of the water, the patterns on the surface, the waves, the ducks, the people, the boats, the sky…
And the same thing happens every time I sit down at the piano to play or sing. No matter how well I know a song I also know that it’s going to be different, somehow.
I can try to play something at exactly the same speed as last time but it will alway be slightly faster or slower, no question. Or I’ll sing something and the words might feel lighter or heavier than the day before. Or while some days with each breath it might feel as if could make a single note last forever, other times it feels as if I have to work twice as hard.
Of course, this is the same for anything creative.
Creativity isn’t a machine we can switch on, expecting the same thing each time. We can’t predict the outcome, not exactly. We can plan and prepare but the nature of creativity is that we can’t know exactly how things will go.
This is the case no matter what it is you’re creating or how big or small it is. You can return to the same page, the same project, the same song, the same recipe, and still it meets you differently each time.
Like my lake, we are always changing, and that is, of course, part of what it means to be human. And anything we create is subject to this variability.
The creative work we do will shift, just as we do.
In winter the lake is another world altogether and the thought of diving in is unimaginable, at least to me. There are those hardy souls who swim year round but I am not one of them, not yet!
But, for now, it’s still warm. So I’ll swim and swim until the cold turns me away, and then I’ll dream of it until spring.