It’s a poem about them, but it asks questions about all of us:
What will we make of our lives?
What will we do with our energies?
What kind of world will we create?
Which leads to the penetrating question for every one of us—including you:
What will you do with your blinking line?
You create your life.
You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something. And you have way more power to do this than you realize.
What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.
All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.
There’s a great Latin phrase that helps me make sense of the wonder and weirdness of creating a life. Ex nihilo means out of nothing. I love this phrase because you didn’t used to be here. And I wasn’t here either. We didn’t used to be here. And then we were here. We were conceived, we were birthed, we arrived.
Out of nothing came … us.
You.
Me.
All of us.
All of it.
There is an ex nihilo-ness to everything, and that includes each of us.
Who of us can make sense of our own existence?
Have you ever heard an answer to the question How did we get here? that even remotely satisfied your curiosity? (Is this why kids shudder when they think of their parents having sex? Because we get here through some very mysterious and unpredictable biological phenomena involving swimming and winning? … Our very origins are shrouded in strangeness. You and I are here, but we were almost not here.)
My friend Carlton writes and produces television shows and sometimes I watch his shows and I’ll say to him, How did you come up with that? Where did that come from? We’ll be laughing and I’ll say, What is going on inside your head that you can make this stuff up?
Have you ever encountered something that another human being made and thought, How did she do that? Where did that come from?
When I was in high school my neighbor Tad, the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience) gave me two ceramic heads that he had made. One head is green and has a smiling face, and the other head is brown and has a frowning face. They are very odd sculptures. But at the time he gave them to me I was mesmerized.
You can do that?
You can take a pile of clay and break it in two and then mold it and work with it and make that?
As a seventeen-year-old I was flabbergasted with the ex nihilo-ness of what Tad had made.
He just sat down and came up with that?
(By the way, he gave them to me in 1988. I still have them; they’re on the wall next to the desk where I’m writing this book. Twenty-eight years later.)
The ex nihilo-ness of art and design and music and odd sculptures and bizarre television shows reminds us of the ex nihilo-ness of our lives—we come out of nothing. And we’re here. And we get to make something with what we’ve been given.
Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us:
What kind of world are we making?
Which always leads to the pressing personal question:
What kind of life am I creating?
Now for some of us, the moment we hear the word create, our first thought is,
But you don’t understand, I’m not the creative type
or
That’s fine for some people, but I’m an accountant and it’s just not that exciting
or
What does any of this have to do with being a mom?
About ten years ago I was speaking at a conference and I decided to sit in the audience and listen to the speaker who spoke before me. He began his talk by saying that there are two types of people in the world: numbers people and art people. He explained that some people are born with creativity in their blood and so they do creative work and some people aren’t—they’re the numbers people—and that’s fine because they can do other things.
I sat there listening, thinking, That’s total rubbish.
Take accountants, for example.
Accountants work with numbers and columns and facts and figures and spreadsheets. Their job is to keep track of what’s being made and where it’s going and how much is available to make more. That structure is absolutely necessary for whatever is being done to move forward. It is a fundamentally creative act to make sure things have the shape and form and internal coherence they need.
Obviously, bureaucracies and institutions and governments and finance departments can be huge obstacles to doing compelling work, but ideally—in spirit—the person who gives things their much needed structure and order is playing a vital role in the ongoing creation of the world, helping things move forward. (Which is an excellent litmus test for whether the work you’re doing is work that the world needs: Does it move things forward? Because some work doesn’t. Some work takes things in the wrong direction. Some things people give their energies to prevent other people from thriving. Some tasks dehumanize and degrade the people involved. Perhaps you’re in one of those jobs, the kind that sucks the life out of your soul and you can’t see the good in it. Stop. Leave. Life is too short to help make a world you don’t want to live in.)
And then there are moms. I’ve met moms who say I’m just a mom …
Just a mom?
What!?
Could anything be more connected to the ongoing creation of the world than literally, physically bringing new human beings into existence and then nurturing that new life as it’s shaped and formed?
All work is creative work because all work is participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
But what about the things that happen to us that we never wanted to happen? What about tragedy and loss and heartbreak and illness and abuse—that list can be long.
What about all of the things that come our way that make us feel powerless and out of control, like our life is being created for us?
When I was growing up, my dad