I started this update over on my biweekly monthly newsletter. While I've deviated form the list format over the past couple of summer updates, the more I wrote, the more I felt this slightly more cohesive rambling needed to live here on my blog. I'll round out the sporadic summer updates there as well, maybe later today, maybe next week. And what a busy summer it's been! Working on the podcast (season 2!) has completely filled in all the little nooks and crannies of free time this summer. I’ve also recently moved into a new/manager role at work. Perhaps I’ll say more about it in a future post when the transition is official and further underway (I just accepted the role less than two weeks ago). I’ve written about my current day gig in a few different posts over the past nearly six years, but most recently here.
Last summer was a bit of a turning point for me. Maybe because I was also reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I started to realize how much of my life I’ve spent working toward some future thing that, in the end, doesn’t always pan out. On the one hand, as Burkeman touches on, as someone who majored in art, I can definitely relate to “the feeling of frustration at having to work a day job in order to buy slivers of time for the work you love.” This is, after all, the story of my professional life (I’ve written about almost all of my 20+ day jobs here). And, I'd add, the impetus behind the podcast!
On the other hand, I realized I’ve been erring on the side of indecision (my former manager’s feedback staying with me all last summer into the 2024-25 school year): “We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path…because ‘the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.’” I mean, just look at my ridiculous to do list when I quit my last job! What that two-year experience between jobs taught me is I was basically throwing spaghetti at the wall, so to speak, seeing which noodle would stick (the noodles being all the different creative endeavors I thought I’d accomplish with just a little more time) without bothering to define what sticking to the wall, to continue the metaphor, would even mean. Other than failing to monetize any of those creative projects, how was I measuring the "success" of any of those pursuits? I wasn’t.
Instead, I’ve tried to embrace this: “The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.” Put a little differently a little later in the book: “Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.”
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| A recent example of living fully in the present in central Oregon |
So that’s what I’ve tried to do. And the truth is, what I really want to do at the end of the day, when my day job is done, is not necessarily "produce" art. Like the industrial worker that Burkeman references, this is "what they actually longed to do with more free time: To 'look around to see what is going on.' They yearned for true leisure, not a different kind of productivity." In a weird way, too, this has helped me find peace with where I am creatively. I started the MFA program at SMFA in Boston almost exactly 20 years ago (lots of 20-year anniversaries in 2025!). Life after grad school did not go as planned, creatively and professionally speaking, and I've been agonizing over this and driving myself a little crazy ever since, trying to prove to myself and the world that I majored in art, pursued the terminal degree in it, even, for a reason and that reason would be validated by external sources. But that hasn't really happened. Does that make me any less of an artist? Why doesn't my unused French degree gnaw at me in the same way (wouldn't it be funny, though, if it did?). At the end of the day, lots of folks make perfectly acceptable careers out of a series of jobs that have little to do with what they studied when they were in their early 20s.
Instead, I'm slowly but surely finding peace after art school. Peace, and patience. Burkeman again: "as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience." It's also one of the most consistent and satisfying takeaways from podcast interviews thus far, with 10 down and just one left to record. Speaking with a variety of creative folks at different stages of life, art, and parenthood has me returning to this idea of patience, something that's I think just really hard to embrace when you're young (which is ironic, if you think about it, given you potentially, theoretically, if all goes well, god willing and all that, have so much life ahead of you at that point): "patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future."
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| Speaking with artist David Burke for the upcoming season of Artists in Offices (parent edition!) |
What I love about Burkeman's book is that it's not prescriptive, per se, but it does provide a sort of set of instructions in various ways that I'm finding are echoed in these podcast interviews I'm recording with working parent artists. For example, he shares "three rules of thumb...especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life." Considering the second rule in particular—"embrace radical incrementalism"—when the podcast episodes are published and you begin listening to them (which you will, right?), you'll see that pretty much every artist that I speak with talks about how, after becoming a parent, they learn to "chip away" at their creative projects: "They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term."
It's taken me six years to get back to the podcast. That was not my plan. But in those six years, four of the artists I spoke with during season one became parents. Had I gotten around to season two more quickly, I wouldn't have been able to include two of those artists in this round of interviews. Indeed, I'm learning, with the podcast as just one example, "to allow things to take the time they take." And there's a really profound sense of peace with that, like letting out a big sigh of relief (try it when you're sitting in traffic running late to something...at that point it's almost completely out of your control and will take the time it's going to take!).
All that said, I am excited to be approaching the home stretch of podcast production so I can share these conversations with anyone willing to listen, hopefully by late September. Stay tuned (here, here, and/or here).
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