This year I'm newly focused on consistency, specifically in terms of my schedule. As a independent artist and freelance teacher, I'm starting to see that imposing consistency on my weekly schedule has its value. I'll give you one example:
A little more than a year ago I took up Transcendental Meditation. During the 3-day introductory course, our teacher explained that having a twice daily regular mediation schedule was important to the practice. And so for the first several months I would meditate for 20 minutes first thing in the morning before going to the gym and for another 20 minutes in the evening before dinner. I noticed a deepening and expansion in my thinking within a week. And it went beyond just my creative work but had a positive impact on aspects of life that I might ordinarily not consider essential.
For instance, for my music classes and individual lessons, I teach at the piano. It's an old beat up Steinway grand that I bought for a song at an estate sale years ago when I was living in Boston. I love the piano dearly. Its sound inspires me and it has lots of scratches all over its casings -- most from before it came to live with me but some from a time when a dear friend housed the piano in her living room when I first moved to NYC and was renting a friend's dining room as my bedroom.
Anyway, in my current apt I'd always kept the piano tucked into a corner, facing a wall. After a couple weeks of twice daily meditation I had an epiphany. What if I turned the piano around so that as I played I was facing the room and the big window on the other side.
What a difference this simple change made! My friend Andrew observed:
Before it was as if you were trying to hide the piano and now the piano takes center stage.
This change not only made me feel better whenever I played, it also made the piano sound better. And as you might imagine, I found myself doing my own practicing a lot more than I ever had before when it was facing a wall.
Practicing piano had another unintended consequence. I started writing more music.
I'm grateful this simple change occurred to me. A change that first struck me as a simple matter of furniture arranging. And I credit the consistent practice of mediation with giving me the idea to move it.
So... it seems to me we all have to be mindful of a delicate balance between a foundation of order out which can spring our innovative impulses, which as artists we must never ignore.
If you have any similar areas where you observe the yin & yang of predictable patterns and creative impulses, please share them with me here.
