Blog post for hannahhannahjones.com Creative Rebels project on creative process, by Elena Hailwood. Photo by Eric Brehm.
Some weeks ago, I was walking in the park close to my house. I call it my sanity walk: a single lap around the perimeter of the park, looping past the large pond in the centre, the scruffy tennis courts, the shelter where groups of men in their forties listen to trance music on their phones and drink cider. There are always ducks in the pond, always a few parents with children, and always other ‘young professionals’ (ugh!) doing laps around the park to stay sane. Every day it’s mostly the same scene, with different hues and different people playing the same roles.
That day was not much different either. But as I passed the pond, I noticed the resident ducks were joined by four geese who were screeching loudly and frankly disturbing the peace. As I watched, the furthest goose squawked, splayed his wings and skimmed across the water towards the next. My first thought was ‘That bastard! He’s bullying the other geese’ (yes I did gender the goose, read what you will…). But then, just as he reached the next goose, this one did the same: propelling across the water towards another. And the next followed suit. I must have stood for five minutes, thinking ‘what the fuck are they doing?’. And then it struck me: ‘They’re playing Tiggy It! The geese are playing Tiggy It’.
The geese’s ‘game’ (as I saw it), somehow both absurd and ordinary, got me thinking about playfulness and structure, monotony and freedom. Between the endlessness of work and housework and the emotional strain of lockdowns, I’d been trying to find the time and attention for writing – the thing that, for me, gives life sharpness and texture and colour. I’d started reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihályi - a sort of cliché, slightly tragic, self-help classic - in the hope that it might help me get back in the zone. One of the central points is that to be in flow (a state of absorption with what we’re doing) there must be clear rules and boundaries to the activity, so that there is no indecisiveness. With sports, the player knows the beginning, the end and the rules of the game. In Tiggy It everyone knows their part: chase or run, and there is freedom in that singularity. The joy and laughter and relief that comes with knowing there is nothing else to do but chase or run.
So….what about art? Don’t we need to know the rules of the craft but also expand them, subvert them, do something new? I wanted to know how to feel fully committed when we’re totally at our own behest, freefalling, making it up as we go along. When we’re working in our own homes, amidst washing, and partners and housemates….and (more) washing! Csikszentmihályi had less to say on this (sorry).
Another, perhaps more helpful, point of the book is that flow comes from a perfect tension between skill and challenge. If the task is too easy, you’re bored. If its too hard, you’re anxious. But if it stretches your capacity, the task holds your attention. I’ve started the think that perhaps Csikszentmihályi needed to think more about the system we work in. That maybe it’s not just the task that can demand too much or too little of us, but life in general. When life is asking a lot of us, maybe we need to keep the tasks easier: hold the novel writing for now.
I would love, honestly, to tell you that I came to some conclusions with this. That the geese were a gateway to a profound and lifechanging epiphany. They were not. I did start to think, though, that maybe I need find a little more playfulness in my approach with myself and my creative work. That the pressure I was applying was only adding more strain and, if nothing else, killing the joy. I’ve stopped beating myself up about not being in a ‘routine’, and have just been finding short bursts of time for bits and pieces… And hey, look, I’m writing!
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