Another Creative Season
The other day, I remarked to someone that I’ve always loved the fall for its weather, colors, and wistful moods, but that I dislike the energy that so often accompanies this next stretch of time — heightened assumptions about what a gift is and money is for, excess disguised as enforced fun.
Two years ago, I looked at the weeks left in the year and committed to spending Mondays without meetings; I aspired for my Mondays to be spent reading. It was a useful, personal rebranding of the end of the year.
Three years ago, I was facilitating a weekly conversation for a team at a nonprofit. Six months into the pandemic, the group was well on their way to rebuilding the trust they had misplaced when everything changed. Someone pointed out that, in their (still) new work from home realities, they couldn’t notice the same cues that normally signaled when a colleague might need an extra hand: a person’s increased pacing, a more often shut door indicating that stress was high or nigh. During one of the sessions I facilitated, this creative individual said to her colleagues with plain urgency: I can’t see our team’s normal signs of wear; I’m here and have capacity to help anyone, but I need you to be explicit with me about what those needs might be in this last gasp of the year.
Each year around now, since 2020, I’ve thought of that team and that colleague’s kind offering as the holidays descended. And ever since this week in 2021, I’ve thought of these last six weeks of the year as a creative season unto itself, in which to try something: a new habit, a re-commitment to a creative project, another way to think about how we want to use time.
This year, I have a small mountain of things I hope to do before year’s end: crafting a pitch for a leadership pilot, renewing healthcare, reading a book a week, keeping a svelte inbox, shaping the nonfiction book I’m writing, drafting more of a second novel, writing ten cousins of my poem “Secret Energy No One Knows I’m Spending” (as a friend prompted me in summer but I’ve yet to do, a small post-it daring me on my desk each morning).
If you think about your own last gasp of the year, what is most important for you to try; more importantly, how do you want to be? What moods do you want to try on, banish, or fine-tune? What experiments are possible to explore and worth seeing if they might follow us into 2024?
My work with individuals is deeply related to my work with teams. The question is always, are you willing to try something new or renewed. Are you willing to ask for help before there’s a crisis? Can you imagine another way of collaborating?
The work I lead depends on time and intention. In this way, my facilitation practice is intricately related to my creative life. Running a business as an artist isn’t all beauty, but the creative engine continues to start over, again. How do you hope the engine sounds as we approach winter?