If I were a tightrope walker (I am not a tightrope walker), I would say that balance requires awareness and presence.

At least, at first.

If you've learned to walk a tightrope (or ride a bike), you'll know that eventually the micro-movements required to keep you upright become automatic and unthinking. I'm not sure if life balance is the same - perhaps it is for some, though I haven't found it to be so, or perhaps there are too many variables for it to be a fair comparison.

Humans aren't machines.

Artists aren't art factories.

Parents aren't child rearing robots.

But often we bow to the pressure of a society that seems to think we should be.

Do more, be more, get better, fit more in, set some goals, achieve them, set some more… now do the thought experiment - can you hit your ten year goals in six months? Do you feel as tired reading this as I do writing it? We're not ingenious contraptions meant for perpetual expansion.

It's going to come as zero surprise to you when I tell you that having a regular creative practice can help you live better.

Aside from the mental health benefits that come with focussed creative time, it’s related to the idea that how you do one thing is how you do everything - you tend to have ways of thinking and feeling and moving through the world that are similar, no matter the circumstances you find yourself in.

And so if you regularly play with a blank page (or in your kitchen or your garden or sewing room - however you like to create) and watch what you do and how you do it, the parts that feel fun and the parts that challenge you (and how you deal with those challenges), you might start to see connections with how you live life in the world outside your blank page or art journal or kitchen or garden or wherever you like to create.

Want an example? Read on...

Given how popular the phrase 'do it anyway' is, I imagine that works for a lot of people, but for me - even thinking about that just makes me kind of tired. Life is busy and fast, and getting faster all the time. Being an adult sometimes feels like an endurance marathon where someone keeps moving the finish line further and further away. Do we really need to push more, and to do things scared?

I wonder if the answer might be no, at least, not all the time. Or maybe no, not that scared.

Why is it so hard sometimes to take the moral high ground and be endlessly empathetic and non-judgemental?

When someone irritates you, as you are probably well aware - often there's a part of you that wants to fight them or tell them what you really think, or turn around and walk away and never come back. And it's necessary to override those impulses because there aren't many situations where you can slap someone or scream at them or walk out and never return with zero consequences.

So what do you do?

Have you ever noticed how other than the horizon, if you're looking out to sea or across a plain, nature doesn't really do straight lines?

If you lie in the grass under a tree and look up at the canopy it's a chaotic jumble of erratic angles and curves. Stones aren't made like bricks, they're tumbled and wind scoured and sun baked and no two are the same. Trees aren't made like walls, they are drawn out of the ground by the sun, bent by the wind, made green by the rain or water tapped by deep roots. They grow in response to their environment.

So do we - we grow in response to our environment.

Getting defensive sometimes gets a bad rap.

"Why are you being so defensive?"

Personally, I think it's kind of nice.

If you think about it - when you're being defensive, you're usually defending something that matters to you in some way. Something you care about. Something you want to protect. If it didn't matter, there'd be no point in defending it.

Have you spent much (or any, come to that) time thinking about doors?

A door is a threshold between two places, but most of us don't really notice them, much of the time.

Think about it, though. Doors are pretty amazing things. They can connect two worlds that are wildly different. They're the point, travelled through, that takes us from somewhere to somewhere else.

There is a kind of presence that, with practice, has the side effect of being a pretty solid bullshit detector.

Lots of us are taught from childhood to look outside ourselves for the compass that will show us the way - the 'right' way, the way forwards, the way to get what we want from our lives. And there's definitely a place for that - when we're small, we need to learn about the world, and it's useful to orient ourselves to what's happening around us, relationally and in the world.

It's less useful when listening to external "authority" (I use that term very loosely) is all you do - when you miss the step of developing, listening to and learning to trust your INNER compass. Your own authority.

It's a little word. A little moment.

And sometimes, it's exactly what's needed between one thing and the next.

I don't know a lot about music, but I do know that it's sometimes in the silences that the magic is made. In the pause, where there's space for the notes beforehand to linger before the melody moves on.

I'm thinking, too, about the way a pendulum might swing, or the stick bit of a metronome (I'm sure there's a nicer name for it than 'stick bit'). The way they pause at the end of their arc, just for a moment, before swinging back the other way.

There are (at least) two kinds of time.

Chronos time is a ticking clock, slices of measured time falling away.

But, the other kind of time, that's where it gets interesting. The other kind of time is Kronos time. For me, it's like time outside of time. Where you're absorbed and have no awareness of clocks. Hours might pass but you're not aware of them. You're somewhere else. You're in deep time, in Kairos time, where you really can have all the time in the world. Perhaps you know it as a flow state. Perhaps it's where you drop into a daydream and live a decade in the time it takes to blink.

If you think about it, symbols have a huge capacity for holding meaning, packed into what is often a very simple shape. For example, a cross is just two lines… and yet it also holds millenia of meaning, both collective and personal.

Anything can be a symbol, a visual representation of something else. A heart, for love. A dove, for peace. An owl, for wisdom. A white stick figure on a blue background for here's the toilet.

Once you start looking, they're everywhere.

I read a thing on the internet the other day that invited a perspective shift. I'm still thinking about it, so here it is - I hope it resonates with you, too.

What if we turned the common advice that we should love ourselves inside out?

What if it wasn't 'do I love myself', and instead was 'do I love BEING myself'?

It's a change in perspective from outside in to inside out.

I could do anything; so why am I doing this?

It's a question I come back to every now and then - usually it hits me like a bolt from the blue when I'm doing something mundane or enduring my way through something I think I "should" be doing, when life has been feeling a bit samey for a while.

It's a reminder that this is my one wild and precious life… and there is so much to be in awe of, and yet I am not all that often in a state of awe. Why is that? I could be doing anything, so why am I doing this?

I've said to a lot of people that this is the fastest year I've ever lived. And that I'm trying to find a time elf who can help me slow it down because it's getting ridiculous. I wake up in the morning and five minutes later it's night again and the days feel like strobe lights.

I still have not found a time elf (though I think I'm getting closer).

But I have found a little bubble of no-time. It's kind of like a weird liminal time-outside-time that feels kind of like a sigh.

I talk about creative self care a lot, and for me, that's not just about engaging in creative activities as a way of caring for myself, it's also about caretaking my creativity itself - finding ways to surround myself with inspiration, so that when I'm tired, or feeling flat, or have run out of words, or I want to draw my way through a challenging feeling, or go on a quest in my art journal to find answers to a particularly tricky question* that life is throwing at me, there is something there to draw from.

What's your oasis of calm?

If calm isn't the word, maybe stability, or peace, or ease.

Another question - where is your oasis of calm?

It can feel a bit like a mirage at times, or like someone snuck in while you weren't looking and brushed away the path. I used to feel calm, but I don't know how to get back to that place. I don't have time. I have a to-do list as long as my arm. Time is going too fast (time is absolutely going too fast for me - I'm looking for a time elf to magic it slow again for me. If I find one I'll lend it to you, if you like).

There's a part of you, of me, of everyone, who knows what to do.

Maybe you forgot how to hear it - I know for me it's a process of remembering and re-remembering. Sometimes weeks or months go by when I just don't hear. It's an easy thing to do, forgetting how to listen to the part of you who knows. The world is full of voices telling you to listen to them, instead. Buy this, follow my ten step process, take these pills, read this giant pile of self help books. The external voices are loud.

The internal voice, the one that knows, can be quiet. And sometimes it tells us things that don't make sense in the context of capitalism.

Creative self care is the best self care. I talk about it being good for stress relief and finding flow, but it occurred to me that those are very 'proper' (and maybe slightly boring) reasons. It's also good for much weirder and more whimsical stuff. Here's a bunch of weird reasons that I've been hoarding like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.

The inner critic gets a bad rap, because often when we're thinking of our inner critics, we're thinking of an unhealthy version that's mean or vicious or thinks that shaming us is useful. The one that tells us we're hopeless or stupid and nothing we create is worthwhile or will ever be good enough.

But, this isn't all an inner critic can be. There is such a thing as a healthy inner critic, who can grow to be one of our greatest supports.