It’s a killer question, as immortalised by Bloat the pufferfish at the end of Pixar’s 2003 movie ‘Finding Nemo’. As February races towards March I can wholeheartedly identify with that fish, bobbing around Sydney harbour in his little plastic bag.
After the final flurry to complete my peatland project it seems I’ve arrived at a creative impasse. I’m lacking energy and direction, missing that comforting sense of purpose and focus that comes with working towards something concrete and time-bound.
The obvious solution is to set myself up with a new project, and I’m not short of options. Since embarking on my curiosity adventure I’ve generated an abundance of notes, collected hundreds of photographs and mapped out all manner of promising trajectories. Trouble is, I’m struggling to commit to anything.
I know I’m keen to revisit some ideas involving sound and music, so I spend a few days indulging my curiosity in the technical and creative challenges of working with audio. Although I’m learning a lot, and I’m highly motivated to learn more, the lack of a clear sense of purpose is still bugging me.
Am I making useful progress, or wasting time? Is following my curiosity constructive, or am I passively allowing it to lead me astray? Maybe underneath all this apparent busy-ness I’m still just floating helplessly in my plastic bag, at the mercy of wherever the tide carries me.
Uncomfortable questions begin to close in on me like hungry sharks. What if all this curiosity-chasing turns out to be pointless? What if I spend six months down an audio rabbit hole only to return empty handed? Or if I keep dreaming up so many creative possibilities that I ideate myself into oblivion? I glare accusingly at my compass charm. What does ‘trust the process’ even mean??
With a heavy heart I face the possibility that I am, and have been, completely wasting my time. It’s not a pleasant moment, but apparently it’s the one I need to reorient myself.
Yes, I may indeed be wasting my time, because embracing the possibility of failure is fundamental to what it means to trust the process. It’s not a matter of having blind faith that everything will work out exactly as I hope or expect, it’s about accepting that whatever my experience brings me will be of value in helping me to learn my way forward. It’s one of the key guiding principles with which I first set this programme of work in motion.
And no, I don’t really believe I’m wasting my time. I think I’ve just learned so much about myself, my curiosity, my creativity and my relationship with the upper moorland over the past few months that I need a minute to take stock and regroup.
I’ve been chasing the ‘what next’ without giving enough thought to the all-important ‘how next’. I need time to digest what I’ve learned so far and feed this back into how I approach this programme of work. Otherwise I’ll stay stuck in this plastic bag, forever adrift on a disorienting ocean of endless possibilities.
So as spring officially arrives I’m having a seasonally appropriate clear-out. I’m setting myself up with more structured methods to support my work and redesigning the framework I use to capture themes, interconnections and ideas. There’s more still to do, but it’s helping with the shark problem. Now to find my way out of the bag.
