“So… what do you want to be when you grow up?” my Dad asked, as the hospital door gasped closed behind us and the cold air of the parking garage blasted into my face.
I was sore from hours laying on the waiting room floor coloring, but I grinned at the attention. My nine-year-old self felt so special, getting to escort my busy father on an important trip to grab random items from the car.
“Um, probably an artist, I guess,” I said, semi-confidently. That was the answer I gave everyone in school.
He chuckled.
“Well, that’s probably not going to make much money, “ he laughingly advised. “You should pick something else too… like a lawyer.”
Suddenly the pile of coloring books I was carrying felt like dead weight.
“Oh… okay,” I said.
My sister’s surgery went well.
The direction of my life bent like a leafy sapling under snow.
The Meaningless Life
“Fight Club” says it best:
Tyler Durden: My dad never went to college, so it was real important that I go.
Narrator: Sounds familiar.
Tyler Durden: So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say “Dad, now what?” He says, “Get a job.”
Narrator: Same here.
Tyler Durden: Now I’m 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, “Now what?” He says, “I don’t know, get married.”
So this is our story now: work hard to get good grades, get into a good college, get a good job, get a big house, a fancy car, make lots of money, die.
There’s no room for meaning or purpose.
And that’s why so many of us feel lost.
I’m a parent now – I don’t blame my dad. I know how hard it is to always say the right thing to kids, how easy it is to steer them wrong.
He was trying to protect me from the biggest danger he could see – poverty, wasted time.
Instead, I found meaninglessness. And that burns too.
Old World Meaning
So… has life always felt this pointless?
I don’t know – I wasn’t there. But theoretically, before the move away from religion in the 18th century, it did that job.
It told us why we’re here, what matters most, gave us a community for sharing it with, rituals and prayers for reconnecting with meaning, and holidays for remembering and celebrating what matters.
Rather like creativity – meaning doesn’t protect us from suffering. But it makes the suffering matter.
It alchemizes it into something worth it.
We need it.
So now, the question becomes: how do we breathe meaning back into our lives – without having to buy into someone else’s (partially toxic) belief system?
Building Your Own Meaning
The trouble with creative life, and anything you are trying to bring into being (like babies, money, marriage, a great career), is that you don’t necessarily know what it’s going to be like after it gets here.
You are trying to arrange your life around an empty space.
You are Building the Banks Before the River (I wrote about that too).
So we have to look at what structures support meaning – before we know what it’s going to be. How do we set up our lives to sustain creating meaning, long term?
Religions have been doing this for thousands of years.
They provide a great model.
Four Legs to Hold Up A Meaningful Life
Systems of meaning, world over (that is, religion, but also things like schools, medicine, the stock market) sustain themselves through these 4 things:
1) Stories
These are the stories we tell ourselves about what we do, who has done it before, and how it works. They range from tales in the bible to medical texts on the function of the spleen. They share info, line up our beliefs, and teach us what is important and why.
2) Ritual
This is a regular process you undergo, with set-up steps, to do the thing, reach the experience. A monk may kneel in prayer at Vespers; a surgeon dresses and checks his tools on the tray before making a cut; a student chews on his pencil and recites the periodic table before a test.
3) Community
Sharing our ideas and efforts with other people – who are engaged in the same work – makes them real. From churches to medical peer review to teachers and students in school – we bring our meaning to the community. Then it is reflected back to us, and we see how to improve. It becomes behavior and is anchored in how we live with others.
4) Cycles
Holidays are times for remembrance, rest, celebration, and review (along with times to push ahead). Humans, like seasons and bears, were not designed to run on all cylinders forever. Schools have tests, doctors have performance reviews, the stock market closes every day. We need times to stop and remember why we care.
How to Build the Supports of Creative Life
Creative life is a long project in the dark, of trying to sustain what means the most to you, in corners, in stolen moments.
This is a map for how to build structures in your life that keep it alive.
This is how we build the banks so creativity and meaning can flow through:
1) Read things that remind you that creativity and meaning MATTER. I recommend Awakening Creativity by Carrie Schmitt, War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is a favorite too.
2) Practice “creativity hygiene” like you would “sleep hygiene”. Set aside a time after something you always do, get in the mood with a cup of tea and a walk, set up your materials, and do your thing for a certain amount of time. Mine involves walking around my kitchen talking to myself in the dark. Totally fine. Just do what gets your creative juices flowing. Treat it like sacred work (it is).
3) Share it with people. Substack is great. Tell people in your life, if they’re supportive. Talk about it like it matters. Ask for feedback, or help with parts you aren’t sure of (even if they don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s okay). Let your ideas grow from partnership with their ideas.
4) Remember to celebrate your successes, rest, recalibrate, and go with the ebb and flow of life. I’m counting every month I survive on Substack the way I would count a baby’s milestones (I’m at month 3.5 – smiling and learning to push up!). Set times to celebrate, and do a weekly review of what worked, what felt good, what didn’t. (I do a rune/tarot reading on how I’m feeling about things.) Some weeks are good, some are rough. Just keep coming back to it.
What I Would Have Told Her
Sustaining creative work is a big project. It takes effort over a long time. Just like building things that make your life feel meaningful isn’t a one-and-done.
And life does not always give helpful advice as far as what you should focus on to keep going.
If I could go back, as a grown-up, to talk to my nine-year-old self – I would say, “Yeah, making money can be good.
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But what brings you joy?
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What feels like magic?
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What makes you feel alive?
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What do you love enough to push through the hard parts?
“That’s what you should be doing. Not when you grow up.
“Today.”
Happy creating,
Morgan
P.S. You may like this one too on why the world needs your weird:
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