Ten thousand ideas & the sweet spot of busy-ness
A Grade-A Izzy ramble for your Tuesday morning.
I’ve done it folks, I’m in a happy place with my work where I’m busy but not too busy.
From November until the end of March I had to cut down to 4 days a week on the film I’m on just so I had an extra day of headspace to complete freelance assignments that were still hanging over me. As of the 1st of this month I’m back on the film 5 days a week, and I’ve got my other work down to only things I’m enjoying. I’ve realised I need to be a bit busier than just a 5 day a week job, but not so much so that I have to work all weekend every weekend. I’ve found the sweet spot for my incredibly busy brain!
And on that note, I’ve got ten thousand ideas again. I told myself recently that if I do my ideas one at a time I’ll have all the time in my life to complete them all, but the problem with that is that I get these bursts of inspiration from time to time that I can’t seem to aim at just the current idea at hand. Instead, like last night, I’ll suddenly spend 2 hours at 10pm writing 5000 words on a story I told myself I’d shelve for a year or two.
I don’t like to ignore or try to contain these sudden bursts of inspiration, it feels good to let my brain run away with itself and almost like I’ve released a tonne of tension from my body to get the words and ideas out onto a page. Sometimes it feels like the creativity in my brain is a strange being I have to learn how to co-exist with.
I am worried, to some extent, that I’ll become that person who has a thousand ideas that they never realise. The ideas I have are usually a little too grand to just start and get on with. The tasks become daunting and I’m not sure how to begin. I hope, once the film I’m on wraps, I’ll be brave enough to take some time off, a month or so, and do a deep dive on one of my ideas … making a good enough start that I get the ball rolling; creating enough work that I can then continue chipping away at it on weekends or in between jobs.
I’ve stop setting myself new year goals to get a certain amount of any of my ideas done… all that causes is disappointment when another year has passed and the ideas are still swirling around in the soup of my mind with no place to go. I hope the time they sit and marinate helps them, and that I’ll see them more clearly when I finally scoop them out and get to work on them.
But, I am so happy at the moment. I love the film I’m on. I love the posters I’m making with Spoke Art. I love the little projects I felt out on here and there. I hope all this joy is reflected in the work I’m producing. I feel so utterly grateful that I am here drawing and painting things I love every day that the worry about my own ideas is slowly dissipating. I find it such a joy to help bring others’ stories to life that the pressure to make my own ideas has subsided a little … if I spent the rest of my life just working on other people’s ideas (as long as they remain as creatively inspiring and freeing as the ones I’ve worked on so far), I think I’ll be okay.
Who knows if you’ll ever see my short film, or pluck a book I’ve written from the shelves of a bookshop. But there’s something wonderful in having those dreams even if they are never realised. It makes my life feel full of possibility, but the good thing about possibilities is you don’t have to act on them … if happiness takes me another direction I will simply float away from my ideas and do something else.
PS. I’ve renamed this blog The Smooth Pebble Club. Earlier this year I was half-joking half-serious about creating a Patreon where the main tier was The Smooth Pebble Club … I had the idea that one of the benefits would be I would send you a tiny smooth pebble from my ever growing collection once a year. I impulsively collect them from the beach, and the 3 in the top image on this post have lived in my pocket for so long, that I have managed to smooth them into almost having reflections by tumbling them around in my hands (it’s an ADHD thing I think ahaha). Anyway having a smooth pebble in my pocket centres me, and helps me find calm … and in some way I treat this substack the same way.