Go toward what feels most alive

<blockquote class = “epigraph”>”A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within.” <footer>Ralph Waldo Emerson</footer></blockquote>

“There is no quick way to enlarge a soul,” Juliette Aristides writes. “Efficiency and perfection mean nothing to the part of ourselves that longs for a deep connection and peek behind. the veil of the world. How can we know which experiences will contribute to our growth?”

Aristides argues for ongoing practice, completing the loop by actually putting pen to paper, fingers to keys. The practice of doing opens up new ideas of what to do, until “cause and effect are indistinguishable.” This kind of practice is its own justification; engagement with the real is its own proof.

This kind of emergent approach to creativity can feel difficult. It’s tempting to worry about efficiency, directness, and dead ends, and try to create a top-down plan for creativity (or research for that matter.) But the inner artist is a child and responds better to sneaking off than it does to grim duty. Even whimsy is a practice that gets easier with the doing, a process by which you learn to pay attention to what interests you, and you learn to sit in ambiguity.

It can also feel difficult because it is largely not something that you do as an active participant. Instead, it’s a noticing of something that happens to you or in you. You can’t force it. Instead, you need to shape conditions to help those gleams flash, and you need to make space to notice it. This comes up over and over in work on creativity. Julia Cameron prescribes a week without reading (one may also assume without scrolling or listening to podcasts) in The Artist’s Way, RuPaul Charles endorses meditation in his Masterclass.

References

Aristides, Juliette. The Inner Life of the Artist: Conversations from the Atelier. New York: Monacelli Press, 2025.

“Curiosity is an artistic prime mover. The best questions are the ones that can’t be answered by an internet search but set our hearts on a pilgrimage.” p. 14

Urbaniak, Kasia. Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power. TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.