Being creative is a source of anxiety. The anxiety often arises particularly beginning a creative process when facing a blank page.

I feel that way often when formulating an essay until I settle on an inspiring idea or interesting experience. The “blank page” can also be a metaphor for the beginning of a new day, experience or time of life.

I have been reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. She says that creativity is really about developing good work habits. I like her idea of rituals as a way to prepare for creative work. I consider creative work to be anything that allows us to put our personal signature and stamp on it. There is no place to hide when we are creative. It is the real us.

Rituals provide predictability in a life that holds the potential for a great variety of outcomes, only two of which are certain. They function to ground us in our anxiety that is part of the human condition and inescapable in a creative life.

Anxiety is then to be managed rather than avoided or eliminated. It is the energy supply for a creative life. Being grounded in our anxiety allows us to focus and mobilize our creative energy in order to live an interesting life with intention.

I have thought of such rituals as “grounding routines”. They are the daily habits we have that if disrupted leave us feeling a little unsure and in a state of unmanaged anxiety subject to default life patterns or autopilot that are not in our best interest. Better to be in cruise control.

So creativity induces anxiety and managing anxiety is necessary for being creative. Mary and I have both spoken of our rituals in past essays that include sitting quietly in front of the fire in the morning with our coffee and playing double solitaire after breakfast before we each step into our separate days.

We also think that rituals are important at the completion of a creative session or day in our lives. They serve as a bridge or transition to the next one and set a predictable occasion. Mary organizes her studio so that it is ready when she returns in the morning.

In my work, I like an organized and clean desk when I start so I leave it clean and organized when I finish. There is no energy depletion from coping with chaos, remembering, of course, what is one person’s chaos is another’s comforting and energizing ritual or habit.

The second half of life is like a blank page. It can be both exciting and daunting because we are in charge of filling it. We are less responsible to the expectations of others in relation to earlier roles. Roles provided us with predictability and certainty but often in a state of autopilot inhibiting creative intention or the real us. Leaving roles behind creates space, a blank page, in all probability, containing more uncertainty and affording us with the possibility of many more varied and interesting outcomes than we have every faced before.

It is a time, more than ever, to manage anxiety. It has been said, perhaps by those younger than us, that we become more set in our ways as we age. It has also been noted that what seems like inflexibility is simply that we have made good decisions and are sticking to them. Inflexibility may be, at least in part, habits that serve to ground us in our anxiety in this time of life so that we can focus our energy on fully embracing it.

© C O P Y R I G H T   2 0 0 9.  Gary Holdgrafer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.