This piece was written ‘offline’ during my May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Fellowship. It’s an incredible program for any author or illustrator working in children’s literature in Australia.
—
It’s taken 3 or 4 days of ‘nothing’, but something has arrived.
I was quietly panicking about my time in Adelaide leading up to this month – 4 weeks, alone, with nothing but my own stupid brain. Would I have an idea? Would I make anything? Or would I flounder about and spend 4 weeks having a ‘holiday’ with nothing to show for it.
Well, week one’s lesson is a profound reminder that nothing is something. And nothing, most of the time, is scary. That’s why we avoid it like the plague. It’s far easier to fill ‘empty’ moments with all the ways that have been habituated in regular life – browse instagram, put the washing on, check emails etc.
Humans are, mostly, responding to their immediate environment. And so it’s only when regular life changes overnight (through something like travel) that we’re presented with a refreshed possibility of changing our habits. When I landed in Adelaide I turned off Instagram, I quit caffeine, I invested in my bodily health through things like massage. In my day-to-day life, I would’ve said “I’ve started to do nothing.” And then, of course, as nothing has a tendancy to do – it created ‘something’.
In fact, I always knew this, but somehow, just forgot about it. I’ve written about it time and time again – we fill the space we create for ourselves but creating the space is the difficult bit. The start of this fellowship is a good reminder, especially after an intense series of world-shaking events like a global pandemic, that going back to first principles to get in touch with what lays below the surface-level mind is always worth doing.