I Would Give This Week an F
On the difference between busy and full…again
Living by Making | Issue 20
At the Workbench
If I am honest about it, this week gets an F. A big one, the kind a teacher puts at the top of the paper in red ink so there is no ambiguity. Not because nothing happened. Too much happened. A tooth came out Monday. Amazing doc, very little pain from the extraction. Cool. Pickleball five days this week. A video call with a friend in Ireland sorting out the real details of me going over to dog and studio sit for a month this fall while she travels to teach, the two of us going back and forth about the property, the house, the area and how I will likely just live, experience and photograph rather than paint. An art reception. Hours in the studio with Suno making music, which is its own rabbit hole I am not ready to talk about yet. A goat painting I will get to in a minute. And directly before the reception, two hours in the mud at the arena photographing Mutton Bustin’.
A full list. An impressive list, even. The problem is that almost none of it was experienced. It was catalogued. I moved through the week the way I used to travel, which is to say I planned the joy right out of it.
I used to be the person who mapped every trip to the minute. Departure timed to avoid traffic through major city hubs. Bathroom and food stops calculated. The engineers reading this are nodding, and I get it, I loved that part too, the research and the fiddling with the details. The challenge is that by the time I got in the car the fun had already happened. The planning was the trip. The actual driving was just the part where I confirmed what I already knew.
These days I much prefer the version where I wake up and get in the car and just start going, maybe somewhere that struck me while I was sleeping, maybe nowhere in particular, and the not knowing is the whole point. I am fully aware that some of you just felt your chest tighten reading that. But think back on the times you have felt most alive. I do not know about yours, but most of mine were not planned.
This week had that same old destination-travel energy. A full itinerary, every slot accounted for, not enough room in any of it to actually be where I was while I was there. Busy, not full. We have talked about this before, the difference between those two words, and it keeps coming back around because I keep needing the reminder.
Busy is a to-do list that keeps cropping up in your brain with not enough check marks on the completion side. Full is being tired in a different way, the kind where the soreness evaporates with the balm of contentment. I was not content this week. I was accomplished. Those are not the same feeling. Accomplished is not the goal. Living is.
Except for the sheep.
It had rained most of the day. The barometric pressure was the kind you can feel in the hair on your arms, everything standing at attention, the air heavy and electric. The groomed floor of the arena had gone to mud, thick and sticking to my boots, each step noticeably heavier than the one before. Klingons, my brain said, unbidden, referring to the mud on my boots. But because I cannot help my geekiness a Star Trek reference registered before I could stop it, and I snickered at myself standing there in the mud with a camera. I still remember thinking as a kid growing up in an ag environment, I want to be a cowboy, I can ride that soft fuzzy thing. I mean how hard can it be? Kind, gentle creatures, not a bull, not a bronc.
The chute is smaller than you expect. Boots, hat, small chaps passed down from some unknown buckaroo, dragging the muddy ground. Hat set aside for the now mandatory helmet, which is a good idea. Real cowboys on either side in the chute. The rain clouds break and the coolness of the overcast begins to lift as the sun comes through as if clearing the lens for a better view. And then the kid’s face. There is a moment, and it lasts about half a second, where the expression shifts from I’ve got this to something I can only describe as theological. The sheep is not on board. The sheep has never been on board. A fist full of wool. The chute opens. The sheep explodes toward the center of the arena. Two seconds, maybe, before the ground meets the kid’s face and the cowboys’ hands are already lifting. Helmet was a good call. And the kid is asking to get back in line before the mud is off.
I could barely hold the camera. I was laughing and shooting and completely, entirely there, not checking the time, not thinking about the next thing, not cataloguing. Just in it. Two hours in the mud and I could not tell you where a single minute went. That is what full feels like. That is the grade I am actually grading for.
The only other time it happened this week was the goat.
I finished a painting, a small portrait of a goat I have been calling Certified Emotional Support Goat, and I laughed out loud, alone, standing at the easel with a brush still in my hand. I do not think that has happened before, not like that. I have painted things I am proud of, things that taught me something. But laughing alone at something I made? That was new. I love this painting more than is reasonable for a single small portrait of a farm animal. There is a look on this goat’s face that I will not describe because some of you will see it soon enough, but whatever it is, I did not plan it and I am not entirely sure how it got there.
And then, not five minutes past the laugh, I was already pricing card stock. I had a whole series in my head. The Certified Emotional Support Goat. The Life Coach Pig. The Risk Management Donkey. The Mindfulness Cow. The Emergency Preparedness Chicken. I was three animals deep into a product line before I had finished enjoying the first painting. Seriously. Where does it stop? Sometimes I want a bright red shutdown button, something like the Staples Easy button, where I could just stop the barrage of thoughts and ideas that fill up journal pages and books only to die when the ink dries because I will never get to all of them.
Under the Surface
Arthur Koestler had a word for the thing that happened with both the sheep and the goat. He called it bisociation, and his argument was that creative insight, and humor, come from the collision of two frames of reference that do not normally touch. Not from depth in one. From the distance between them. The spark is in the gap.
This week was nothing but gaps. A tooth extraction has no business next to a pickleball league. Pickleball has no business next to a conversation about watering someone’s garden in Ireland. None of that connects to photographing children on sheep, which connects to nothing about painting a goat with a look on its face I cannot explain. There was no theme to the week, no throughline, no plan. And the two moments that were most alive, the only two I would not trade, came out of that exact chaos. Not despite the scatter. Out of it. The goat painting did not come from a studio session I scheduled. It came from a week that left enough disorder in the air for something funny to show up unannounced.
There is a study from 1973 that puts a finer point on the other half of this. Researchers at Stanford watched preschoolers who loved drawing with felt-tip markers, kids who would choose markers over anything else during free play just because they liked it. One group was told before they drew that they would receive a Good Player award, a certificate with a gold star and a ribbon. Another group got the same award afterward, no warning. A third group just drew. Two weeks later, the kids who had been promised the reward drew about half as much on their own. The other groups were unchanged. The external reason had quietly replaced the original one, the one that was already working, and when the reward went away the motivation went with it.
Psychologists call it the over justification effect. Lay a visible, expected reason on top of something that was already complete in itself, and the new reason does not add to the old one. It replaces it.
That is the card stock. That is the t-shirt pricing. The goat was already finished the moment I laughed. The joy did not need a product line to justify itself. But forty years of making a living from whatever I love, forty years of the reflex that says if you love it then figure out how to sell it, that is a deep groove. It does not wait for permission. It does not even announce itself. It just starts running, the way my old travel planning used to run, mapping the route before I had decided whether I even wanted to take the trip. The planning replaces the experience. The product replaces the painting. And you find yourself three animals into a series before you have finished standing in front of the first one.
Studio Notes
I have been asking myself one question before I let an idea go anywhere: would I still be glad I made this if not one single person ever bought it? For the goat the answer is yes without hesitation. I would hang it on my own wall and walk past it every morning and it would still be doing its job, which is making me smile. That matters to me because it means the series, if it happens, and it probably will because those animals are too funny not to paint, gets to start from a place I trust. Not this could be a product line. Just this is funny and I want more of it.
The outcome might look the same from the outside. A shelf of whimsical farm animals is a shelf of whimsical farm animals no matter how it started. But I have watched enough of my own work to know that the starting engine changes how the thing feels in my hands while I am making it. Work that begins in delight and picks up a price tag later still feels like mine the whole way through. The brush stays loose. The surprises keep coming. Work that begins as a product starts tightening somewhere around the second piece. You stop following the funny and start following the plan, and the funny is the first thing to leave.
On the Table
A small, completable thing.
Think about the last time you were fully in something, not productive, not accomplishing, just in it. If it was recent, good. If you cannot think of one, that is worth paying attention to. And then ask yourself whether the things filling your week are filling you, or just filling the calendar. They are not the same, and the difference is not always obvious until you stop long enough to check.
In Good Company
Something cool to watch. Camera (2024), streaming on Amazon Prime. A nine-year-old boy who cannot speak moves to a small fishing town and finds his voice through a broken film camera and an unlikely friendship with the local repair shop owner, played by Beau Bridges. It is slow and quiet and unhurried in the best way, and one reviewer said something that stuck with me: the message about not forgetting to live the moment might have been speakin’ to me. That feels about right for this week.
Don’t forget to excercise your reading muscle. The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. Not a cover-to-cover book. One hundred and thirty-one short prompts for paying attention to the world directly in front of you. Pick one, try it, put the book down. It is the On the Table section in book form. Yup, that is an Amazon affiliate link. Put more there for your convenience than the .22 cents I might earn if you click on it and buy something from Amazon while you are there.
Listen: Hurry Slowly, a podcast by Jocelyn K. Glei. The whole show lives in the territory between productivity and meaning, which is more or less where this issue lives too. Start anywhere.
If you want to go deeper: Arthur Koestler’s bisociation framework comes from The Act of Creation (1964). The overjustification study is Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973.
A Quiet Note
The next Unhurried Letters fine art print is already chosen, already printed, on its way next Tuesday to the paid subscribers, set to arrive in the first week of July depending on how slow the snail moves. I am not going to tell you what it is here. That belongs to the people who signed up to be surprised by an envelope in snail mail, not a newsletter online. If you would rather be one of the people opening it next time instead of reading about it afterward, that is what Unhurried Letters is for. Oh and just for hanging on and reading this far. I have several sample copies of Unhurried Letters that I will be sending out on June 30 with the regular mailing to subscribers. If you want one, message me from the link above and send me your snail mail address. They are going out June 30, so this opportunity is only until then. Why would I give a few away? Simple. I want you to experience it and once you do I hope you will sign up. No hidden agenda.
If you have been thinking about it: unhurriedletters.com.
Leave the Light On
I gave this week an F at the top of the page and I meant it when I wrote it. But I have been thinking about it since, and I think the F is for the wrong class. Graded on productivity, on boxes checked and things accomplished, the week is fine. Everything got done. Graded on whether I was actually alive while it was happening, on whether I was in the car or still at the kitchen table planning the route, that is where the F belongs. Two moments out of seven days. The sheep and the goat. Everything else was destination traveling.
I am not sure what to do with that yet. I do not have a tidy answer. But I know what full feels like now because I felt it twice this week, and I know what busy feels like because I felt it the rest of the time, and the difference between them was not the activity. It was whether I was there for it.
Keep making. Even the silly stuff. Especially the silly stuff.
Tio
"Two moments out of seven days. The sheep and the goat. Everything else was destination traveling."
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