Time does march on, and we are part of the parade

March 03, 2019 2:23 PM

The madness of the creative process is, your entire sense of time gets warped.

Because while you’re making something, it takes up your whole life and body and mind.

But then, when you finally put that thing out into the world, it feels so small. It gets compared to every other thing that’s ever been made. And it lives as just one little tile in an infinite mosaic. Not as the enormous soul shape it was when you first created it.

Why do our brains play this cruel trick on us?

Nolan’s masterpiece about dream inception brought this to life on the silver screen. In a dream, he tells us, your mind creates and perceives the world simultaneously. So well, that you don’t feel your brain doing the creating. And so, when you dream, your mind functions more quickly, so time seems to pass more slowly. Five minutes in the real world gives you one hour in the dream world.

Unfortunately, we can’t remove the teeth from this cruel bite of reality. Once we step out of our dream and into the real world, time warps. Once we give birth to this thing, it never feels as big and special and remarkable as it did during conception.

And that’s okay. Part of our work as creators is to have agency over joy during the process, but not to harbor expectation around the product. Because at that point, it’s out of our control.

We must surrender to the infinity of the marketplace, doing our damnedest to take our work on the ride it deserves, but instead of beating ourselves up and cursing the void, we then find our way back to the canvas to start once again.

Time does march on, and we are part of the parade.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How is your relationship with time affecting your creative practice?

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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