Joining the dots

Over the summer (and carrying into autumn..!) I have been carrying on with my new series, by releasing an updated version of my book Circles , chapter by chapter. I wrote Circles over the years when I first became a mother and was struggling to align motherhood, creativity, and faith. It first came out in 2019. For a while I have wanted to rewrite these chapters to be more universal, and accessible to everyone, with or without faith, whether parents or not.

So where does all this leave us?

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I don’t have all the answers, because, like you, I am still on the journey. But I know that as we listen to our hearts, and make our way along the road, making tiny adjustments all the way, we will get to where we’re supposed to go. So here is a roadmap of sorts for finding the way to yourself.

Follow your heart

It is our responsibility to listen to our hearts, and as Frederick Buechner says; this will tell us more about ourselves than we already know. We might have to follow intuition for a while instead of reason. Marc Chernoff, life coach says: ‘Intuition is very real and something that is never wise to ignore, because it comes from deep within your subconscious and is derived from your previous life experiences. If everyone else is telling you “yes” but your gut is telling you otherwise, it’s usually for a good reason. When faced with difficult decisions, seek out all the information you can find, become as knowledgeable as you possibly can, and then listen to your God-given instincts.’[1]

Follow your curiosity

In his Stanford Commencement address, Steve Jobs talks about when he became disillusioned with college but hung around and took a few optional classes. In retrospect, he says, ‘It was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting […] Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.’[2] The calligraphy class that he took ended up influencing the way that the typeface on Macs was designed.

There is an essence of blind faith about all of this. Sometimes we might think, well this doesn’t make sense, but we have to trust that it is all working together. Jobs says: ‘You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.’

Use the power you’ve been granted

An interesting blog I came across recently posted an article entitled ‘12 Quiet Rituals of Enormously Successful Humans’ [3]. One of the insights was that success is loud, but to get there takes a lot of quiet work in the background. This, Susan Cain argues in Quiet, is the introverts’ main strength: ‘The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power but to use well the kind you’ve been granted. Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches.’ [4] The fact that introverts are ‘relatively unmotivated by rewards,’ she continues, ‘gives you incalculable power to go your own way. It’s up to you to use that independence to good effect.’ [5] As artists with a purpose, we sometimes need to put our heads in the sand and just get on with our dreams until they are ready to fly.

Don’t stay blocked!

As Lewis Hyde says in The Gift, we need to pass our creativity on to stop it from becoming blocked. For the water to remain healthy there needs to be an inflow and an outflow. It’s time to start dreaming of how we can use our gifts, like Quentin Blake’s Patrick, how we can walk in our giftings, and make this a part of our day to day lives? What will it take for us to realise that we are free to walk in our calling? For me, as a writer, how can I live this out in my community, in my life, right now, today? How can I take my life into my hands and be proactive about using the gifts I have been given? I have started to teach Creative Writing as well as writing, revising, and submitting my work, and it does feel healthy to be able to ‘pay it forward’, to pass on my passion for self-expression, for really seeing, for finding words for the unsayable. There is a degree of taking responsibility for our own lives here. Start walking in your gifts. Start to give away your treasures.

And there you have it. There is no secret.

Look back at how far you’ve come. Join the dots. Be true to yourself and your art. Give yourself permission to take time, to walk slowly. Give yourself permission to take up space, to make a mess, to keep writing about the same things. Give yourself space to follow those nagging desires that won’t leave you alone.

Believe in yourself. Believe in your work.

Be brave and let it go into the world.

Reading this back, five years after it was originally written is interesting. I was doing a Christmas Fair today, talking with another writer and I was saying how I feel I have wasted so much time and that I wish I had self-published years ago, but as she reminded me you can only do what you did, you can only follow the journey that you are on. In the creative life, time is a curious thing. Sometimes it feels we take giant leaps, and then whole years will pass with nothing seeming to happen. And this fast and slow is all part of it. I am reminded of Gratitude #87, a poem of mine about this.

Gratitude #87

Today has slipped

through my fingers, somehow.

It has got away from me before

I have had a chance to do

anything useful with it.

How many days are like this now?

The wind whips the long grass

into a fury in the field.

The ash tree shakes itself

mournfully outside the window.

See how nature itself is fast and slow,