A Pregnant Pause
Location: Fethiye
Week: 30
Days Travelled: 212
I had many expectations of this year - something I ironically advise people to avoid.
Expectations are not problematic in and of themselves, but it can be very hard to hold them without becoming inexorably attached to them.
There is nothing wrong with having an ideal or wanting something to happen in a certain way, but if it doesn’t is it shattering, disappointing or painful? Similarly, if it does occur, can it be accepted and moved on from or does it become a quagmire, sticky and hard to move on from?
My expectations were varied: visit the places we planned, finish my psych degree, work for a certain period, see this or that site, do this blog regularly.
The one of these this piece focuses on is the last - this blog.
I expected to be updating those of you who want to read my ideas every fortnight, at the very least each month.
This is my first posting in about 5 months, half of my trip.
Instead of feeling frustrated or annoyed with myself, I see it as a great lesson and opportunity to investigate something I find fascinating - the nature of creativity.
It has been said that everyone is creative. I don’t know if this is necessarily true, but I believe we all have the potential to be.
Observing myself this year, as well as Liv who is an artist, struggle to be consistent in our creative practice has been enlightening. For 3 months in Europe, we had a wonderful time with friends and family; frivolity and festivities. We moved around a lot, were with people constantly, had late nights punctuated by laughter and flavoured with red wine and spritzes.
Though this was fun, none of it seemed to foster creativity - at least not in the moment. Everything was active, stimulating, gregarious and extraverted.
Personally, I feel as though creation requires the opposite. It needs consistency, routine, balance, quiet, introspection and reflection. It asks us to go inside ourselves and sift through our experiences in the world to bring forth something new, something that doesn’t yet exist.
Perhaps creativity is the meeting point of movement and stillness? The activity of the human mind, body and life nuzzling the steady boundaries of unfettered, unknown potential?
What is contacting what could be…
To access quiet we ourselves must be quiet; to touch stillness we centre ourselves in stillness - this is something wisdom traditions have always taught. To me, the essence of meditation and similar practices is about cultivating this inner space to see what it offers us to bring back into our lives, and so into the world.
Who and what we are engaging with the potential of who we might be - guiding us in how we get there.
Maybe in doing so, our life becomes an expression of creation itself opposed to it being something we feel like we have to enact ourselves.
Or maybe this is just a clever way of me giving myself an out for having not written more blog posts…
Either way, it reminds me of something I read once: “Silence isn’t emptiness, it is the pregnant pause of something waiting to be born.”
Whether you prescribe to the Bible, the Big Bang or anything in between - any creation story begins with silence and stillness. It is the nothing that now holds the something; the potential permitting the realised.
I feel grateful to have learned how important it is for me personally and look forward to cultivating more of it in the final stages of this trip.
Until soon,
Zig xx
