For the first time in 8 years, I didn’t pick up a watercolour brush over the Christmas holidays. In the beginning, it was difficult, it felt as though I was ‘slacking off’, or procrastinating, or simply not spending my life in the most productive or useful way. But two weeks later, I have a very different perspective.
What did I do instead? I spent very present time with family. I spent a disgusting amount of time (for me) ‘wasting’ it playing playstation. I spent a bit less time exploring Procreate – not to see if I could mimic my watercolour work, but just playing around for fun to see if there’s a way I could enjoy it for image-making. I spent time learning how to take pictures on 35mm film (and bought a lot of camera gear). I even read 3 or 4 graphic novels (and not a single ‘normal’ novel).
In case you’re wondering, all of that is very much out of the ordinary for me.
What I could’ve done instead? Well, my list is long, even beyond “completing the two books I’m currently working on”. I could have lodged my tax return, painted the office, built a frog bog, cleaned the gutters, organised a tradie for our internal doors, weeded the garden, taken some e-waste and paint waste to the recycling facility… there’s a lot more, too. But I didn’t do any of that.
So, did I waste time? Well, if you’d told me that’s how I was going to spend Christmas break before I begun it, I would’ve said yes – all of that sounds like a huge and pointless set of distractions.
But now, the answer is an unequivocal no, because, as I’m writing this, I’m feeling so much energy to get back into watercolour work; an energy that wasn’t there a few weeks ago. And, because of the time I ‘wasted’, I have 2 really fun new hobbies (film photography and my cinema-frames project on Procreate), and a different way to think about storytelling (game-storytelling is a rich space for learning great dialogue and great story arcing).
Maybe I was getting into a rut before but wasn’t aware of it? Or maybe everything is connected in some way? Maybe, no matter what I do, what I’ve realised is that my brain is geared for learning and cross-pollinating ideas across domains that others would not be able to see connections in. Maybe I can’t help it.
Or, maybe there are certain “distractions” that are generally healthy and attempting to optimise our lives with such focus (like we’re driven to do by our commercial and ‘high-performance’ productivity culture) is harming more than helping; or, at the very least, limiting the richness of our possible human experience.