My friend Paul Durham from Black Lab pointed out to me tonight that the fact that I’m discontent all the time with whatever is going on in front of me has nothing to do with whether or not I’m able to be creative.

He’s right.

I realized that I’d connected these two things.  I’ve created a lifetime habit of assuming that I use my creativity as a way to cover up the pain of feeling that things aren’t the way I want them to be.   And that in order to deal with this discontent I’m going to have to give up doing so many interesting things in my life.

Paul pointed out that creation comes out of a vacuum.  Coincidently, I just got a copy of Robert Crumb’s fucking amazing illustrated Book of Genesis, which starts out on page 1 with —

“When God began to create heaven and Earth, the Earth was then without form.  And void, and darkness was over the deep.”

Life creates out of a void.   This is the miracle of creation.

In my case, whenever I slow down enough so that I’m not filling my life was stuff, I automatically start creating new things.  It’s a kind of a miracle.

Most of the time we fill our lives with enough stuff that we don’t have to get down to the void, and actually create.

The important thing (for me anyway) is to disassociate discontent and creativity, because they have nothing to do with one another.