You Need to Stop and Clean the Clutter
Creativity has always been around for me.
Sadly, since I decided to live out of it and became a graphic designer, I lost the drive of creating for the sake of doing it and, eventually, I stopped enjoying it.
When I started to write, I found a way to create freely, to ease and understand my emotions, to get to know my true self (the one that my fearful ego locked in the shadows when I was very young) and to fall in love with my career again.
Last week, I didn’t want to write. Reflecting on my previous story (which is not my best but is rebel and deep), I could see how confused I was.
The storm inside my mind was conditioning my creativity.
It was the perfect moment to have a day-break that gladly translated into a week-break. Now, I can tell you that it was what I needed.
I feel remorse every time I take a break, especially when it lasts more than a few hours. Freelancers don’t usually take full weekends off because we cannot afford it or we want to save some money to do things like traveling.
After saving myself from my maniac perfectionism, I learned to make time for me, and I do it almost every day (at least for half an hour), but I still think that I could be using that time to create something profitable.
Deciding to stop for a whole day was not easy, but I felt profoundly relieved when I acknowledged that I was tired, sad, confused and in need of self-love.
Although I was in a “creative-break”, I was not going to spend it watching Netflix (well, I did use a couple of hours for that).
My house also needed some love, and we were perfect for each other.
Cleaning my space was like cleaning my mind.
I was not ready to write yet, but I decided to paint. I love to paint since I can remember, but after graphic design school, I only associate it with selling my art. This time, I did it because I wanted and I didn’t care for the outcome.
At the end of the first day, I was feeling a lot better. I still was confused and sad, but calmness was starting to rule my mind. That’s how I decided to extend the break until I could heal.
I had a couple of fabulous books that were pending to be finished (“Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari and “El Alma Está en el Cerebro” — The Soul is in The Brain — by Eduardo Punset), and I spent the following days mostly reading, cleaning and painting.
Everything started to find its balance and, here I am, as a new woman (we change every day even if we don’t realize it) who learned a lot from herself in seven days and is dying to write again.
Life did everything to make me stop.
It is the second time that this happens to me; a bit more than a year after the first time (a pause that I postponed until I couldn’t take it anymore). What I learned a year ago is that life is always expecting us to stop and question whatever it is that we are doing with our lives.
This pause was not different. I had everything I needed to heal, ready for my attention. I just needed to give me the time and space to look at those potential remedies.
The mess in my home, the object that was waiting for me to paint it for more than a year, the unfinished books, the final episodes of Sense8, and a random tennis match were perfect to ground me in the beauty of my life.
I was confused because I was not looking in the right direction.
My focus was on my new unavailable future and on the almost perfect relationship that is now in my past, instead of being on the precious and finite present that I do have.
Now you know what caused my sadness and confusion.
Yes, an incredible human being left me. I already knew it because he was not around as usual, but it was “official” a week ago.
As we always do, I tried to find the answer to why he left.
It was a conscious struggle because I believe in not attaching to anything or anybody (as hard as it sounds) and I was crying for my attachment to someone extraordinary.
Grounding myself to the present moment allowed me to remember the joy that I can find within everything I already have, whether I have what I wish for or not.
I even felt grateful for my sadness because it remembered me that I am not made from stone and feeling is also living.
Since I left the father of my daughter (before she was born), I haven’t given me the chance to love and lose somebody else, until this amazing man came into my life. Deep down, crying for him made me feel alive.
I was so afraid of being heart-broken again that I “decided” I would not blindly fell in love or idealize anybody else. But life (and ourselves) is not how we pretend it to be and I was gladly heart-broken again.
So, after embracing my pain, I was ready to move on.
It was not an instant happiness pill, but I feel content even when some tears are still leaking from my heart.
The most curious thing about my healing break is that the books that I was reading talked (among many other things) about our particularly human need for feeling happy.
Those words were a ring to my finger because the sadness and confusion that invaded me were what initially made me stop. I paused because I wanted to feel happy again.
What I hadn’t realized before is that feeling sad isn’t exactly bad.
My allergy to sadness comes from my obsession with happiness.
It is not healthy to feel sad for a prolonged time (because we put ourselves in the doors of depression), but it is not healthy to feel overwhelmingly happy for that long either (because we attach).
Just like it was happening to me with my almost perfect relationship.
Indeed, I was profoundly happy, mainly because I felt cared and loved every time I met him, but I was losing sight of many other blessings in my life. Everything fell at the exact moment that he broke up with me.
Thankfully, that’s why we have a wise life for.
I learned about seeking balance instead of seeking happiness.
Yes, I was happy (and creative) but not balanced.
You can’t imagine how I am neutrally enjoying the order and cleanness of my house (and life) today. I was a little mess with a perfect reason to be happy, but I was losing the balance that I gained when I decided to be the driver of my life.
The cause of most of my suffering is that I have spent my whole life looking for happiness.
I am an EDM (electronic dance music) lover, with a slight and shy taste for some “happy trips” once in a while, who also like to drink beer (because I enjoy to get tipsy but not drunk), and with a tremendous struggle with smoking cigarettes (I can’t tell you how many times I have quit and come back).
Consciously or not, I always want a reward from living.
This awakening thought is not enough to help me quit smoking right away, but it allows me to look for balance (or should I say calmness?) instead of looking for happiness.
I am no one to criticize nothing, but we should stop feeding the importance that we give to happiness to start nurturing the importance of feeling content with what we already have.
We all suffer from the “I am not enough” cancer because we are always seeking for more. We believe that we need to be more to have more to live more.
But if we embrace the joy of living to be fulfilled with the plans that life has for us, we can find balance and be content with our lives, without wasting it while seeking for eternal happiness.
While we were growing up, we were taught that feelings and emotions are not rational and that we must repress those and use our conscious self to make choices.
Now we know that not growing and not managing our emotional intelligence is a huge mistake.
We are complex beings that are more than thoughts and feelings. We are both. We cannot neglect a vital part of our nature that has allowed us to be the kings of the evolutionary line.
(Think about religions, ideas or brands).
Our emotional intelligence has supreme importance in our capacity to cooperate. It is our only way to feel empathy, compassion, and love.
At the same time, it is not a secret that we have problems with managing and understanding negative emotions like anger and hate. We carry the consequences deeply rooted in our societies.
Positive or negative, to feel is what makes us living beings.
Computers are smarter and more powerful than our brains, but codes don’t feel emotions (yet). Maybe it is because we have spent a vast amount of time researching our intelligence while dismissing the importance of our emotional process.
Every time that we ignore, repress or numb our emotions (we have many methods to distract ourselves from those), we reject the chance to know ourselves a little more and deny a shot of the living energy that could potentially ground us to the present moment and our current selves.
To live is to feel. Otherwise, we would be skilled robots incapable of creation.
One of the main characteristics that differentiate us from other intelligent and social mammals (dolphins for example) is our power to create the things that we conceive in our minds.
Every story, painting, product, and even food comes with creativity.
You, my dear reader, are a fountain of creation.
But particular mind states blur our capacity to flow with ideas and solutions. Our muse is not always available, and she doesn’t like to be pushed. She is a rebel that connects with us whenever she wants.
I discovered this first hand when I started to hate graphic design. My muse hates pressure and greed. But now I realize that my emotions have a significant impact on her willingness to come out to the surface.
Being too sad or too happy is an instant blocker on my creativity. Balance is the right state for me to flow.
That’s why my inner self was dying to stop while I was urging for words to come out of my mind. I needed to heal to let my muse be.
We are too engaged in being successful, and we are not used to taking breaks, but we need that time to reflect on our lives and ourselves.
Even when we are on vacation, we fill our schedules with countless visits and activities, but we forget to rest, to feed our souls, and to connect.
You might think that you will lose money when you take some time for you, but think about how breaks boost your productivity. Yes, you might stop earning for a few days, but you will probably make much more after cleaning your mind and rearranging your priorities.
The rush we put on life is a human mistake. We need time for everything, but we are not always willing to use it for the things that matter.
We matter.
We didn’t come here to be on a race against death. Yes, we will all die but why would you want to spend your life rushing to do everything before you die, instead of living today?.
I don’t mean to tell you that you should stop and do nothing, I am telling you to stop once in a while because we all need time to heal.
Just like when we went to school and had lunch breaks, we need some pauses to keep functioning optimally.
There is no need to be and do everything we want today. We have a whole life to do it. But we should not waste our lives worrying about our lack of speed to do whatever it is we dream of.
When life forces you to pause, stop resisting because she knows more about what you need than yourself.
We don’t know a lot about our emotions and feelings, but our body and mind know when we need to stop.
A couple of days, a week, or even a month are nothing compared to what you will earn if you dare to make a pause and question the choices you make for your life.
Just like I just did.
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You Need to Stop and Clean the Clutter
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