Creating Creative Time

It is time for some changes.  My youngest child is turning eight years old next month.  For the past 17 years my mind and days have been occupied with four children who, over the years, have come into my life to enrich and challenge me as only your own children can.  While they still enrich, challenge and occupy my days, I have no ‘little ones’ right now so I am beginning to feel a space opening up in which, if I am careful, I can craft nicely into Creative Time.   

Elio before his first BMX race of 2014.

The problem is that my lifestyle and skill set isn’t set up to allow for creative time just yet.  My two youngest children homeschool so we’re together all day and their academic work is time-intensive for me.  I am constantly behind in housekeeping, menu planning, letter writing, and homeschool planning.  I can’t seem to make myself follow a schedule no matter how simple it is.   My New Year’s resolutions from the past six years have been on repeat – every year I write about the same small handful of goals that I desperately want to accomplish and yet never do.  You can probably guess what they are; I imagine similar goals show up on the majority of New Year’s resolution lists.  Most people want the same things in life: a healthy body, a happy mind, loving relationships and time for creative endeavors.   It’s pretty simple, really.  And yet I could list dozens of reasons why these goals continue to elude me.

Shannon and Joe pre-party in Seattle.

I have taken this on as my challenge.  In order to Create I need to find solutions for the everyday hindrances that stand between me and my vision.  In essence I want to work on the problem from two sides: I’ll create a lifestyle that facilitates Creative Time while working on the actual projects. 

These are the guidelines I’m starting with:

1) Healthy Body.  I can’t give my all to anything if I’m not feeling well physically.  What are the minimum habits I need to feel good?  Sufficient sleep, daily exercise, time spent in nature, being well hydrated and eating for energy.  The specifics of each of these needs to be worked out.

2) Simplify the Present.  A tidy and uncluttered space does wonders for my mental health and my mood.  I can think of very few things that impact my sense of well-being and happiness like a clear space.  I am an intense minimalist; I have not even admitted to myself just how little I like around me because it seems incompatible with the life I’m living.  How can one be a minimalist with four children and 15 pets (if you count all the fish as one)?   My plan is to create a system to go through every belonging we own to remove what is unneeded.

Joe, Armand and Elio launching two rockets they made.

3) Systematize Everything.  I’m going to put all the repetitive tasks of my life into a system that meets my standard of ‘good enough’.   For example, to be content my floors don’t need to be mopped every week or even every other week, but the house does need to be vacuumed every day.  By creating systems I’ll be able to free up hours in my day and space in my brain, both of which I need for Creative Time.

4) Schedule Time, Not Content.  This is a principle of the Thomas Jefferson Education philosophy that I love and that I struggle with.  Dedicate time for each system and use that time wisely to accomplish goals for each aspect of your life.  Remember Parkinson’s Law: ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’  Don’t put off meaningful work while you try to get the rest of your life in order.  It is never all ‘in order’.  I need to create a weekly routine that allows time for everything I want to get done.  The problem is I’ve never been able to follow any schedule I’ve set up, not even for one day.  It is a great challenge for me and yet I think if I can learn how to follow a schedule I’ll find a great deal of freedom and contentment.

This is not necessarily a well thought out list of what I need to do to be able to work on my creative projects.  These just seem like the most obvious place to start and each one has plenty of areas where I need to improve.  I don’t want to spend too much time planning out how to do this.  I think jumping in just may be the most direct route to where I want to go.  I’ll work with these guidelines for now and tweak or change them when that is needed.