Field notes from an aspiring flâneuse

Hello Reader,

After a two-week trip to Montreal with family to visit family, I'm yearning for structure. Routines were tossed aside and sleeves yanked for attention as I stumbled out of my daily rhythm. It was discombobulating and wonderful.

The fabric of our family stitched together despite occasional side-eye looks from my 11-year-old stepdaughter entering adolescence to the sound of Sabrina Carpenter, who’d rather visit Sephora than a waterfall higher than Niagara Falls.

When I came home on Sunday, I was jonesing for space to be and create. I missed my daily practices and creating, and felt out of whack. This feeling doesn’t only stem from the vacay, but signals the closing of a chapter.

I’ve been writing, editing, narrating, and promoting Welcome to the Creative Club for two years. It’s time to wind down, lift my foot off the gas, and make space for other projects.

This has been calling me for a while, but I wanted to give this book every chance I could to make it in the world. At some point, I have to let go and allow it to live its life. The trip to Québec accentuated this urge.

It got me thinking about how to design a new rhythm and routine that gives my creativity breathing room. But making time to create is just part of the Tetris calendar puzzle.

A chapter closing and a new one opening require a redesign of my days. Asking myself, What do I want this next phase to look and feel like? What have I learned from my most recent design? What would I do differently? What would stay the same?

I’m still shaking off sticky COVID habits. Starting my business in 2021 established some serious homebody routines. All my practices are at home, from work to workouts. It’s a safe, beautiful cocoon with high ceilings, lots of light, and plants.

I need to quasi-force myself to go out during the week. I’ve contemplated getting a dog to support my walking habit, but that’s not a valid reason.

I get caught in busyness, despite myself. Maybe it’s a hangover from the book writing. My content elimination diet, slowly weaning myself off social media, resulted in hyper-focus, an illusionary shrinkage of time, and calendar stacking and packing.

There’s something intoxicating, addictive even, about busyness. The busier I am, the more I feel I need to do, the more powerful the craving to strike items off a list (I have dispensed with long to-do lists to avoid the temptation). It feels good to get shit done, like scratching a dog behind its ear.

It’s based on a fallacy - an erroneous, ingrained belief - that to get out of the busy loop and into a place of rest and ease, I need to do more. Once I’ve done x, y, or z, THEN I’ll rest, write, create, or reflect. It’s such a crock of shit. It’s also anchored in the harmful societal narrative that our worth is based on what we produce (rampant capitalism, anyone?).

The only way to get to that place of ease is to create it now. It’s not somewhere in the future, it’s only here. And if it’s not here, it won’t be there. That’s it. I know this, yet I get caught in the clutches of this belief flytrap, stuck buzzing on a ribbon of glue. It’s an old, defunct strategy, a repeated behavior that makes it easy to slip and slide down this worn path again and again.

It’s time for an extinction moment. Time to pause in the middle of life in full swing. To catch myself when I'm speeding and pull over, realizing that I’ll get to wherever I’m going faster if I slow down, and most importantly, enjoy the ride. Hair blowing through the cracked window, staring at the mountains, inhaling pine-scented air.

In this pregnant pause, this void, an appreciation stirs, honoring how far I’ve come, and acknowledgment that a new way of moving and being is required for my next creative evolution. It’s smooth, intentional, and realistic. I tend to overestimate what I can do in a day.

And trust me, Reader, I can do a lot. But it’s not just about doing, but enjoying, languishing, reveling in this life I’ve been gifted, and creating and making.

So, it’s time for a redesign, to run an experiment, and create a new rhythm that incorporates the data from two years of creating for myself and others.

Experiments are meant to fail; that’s how data is gathered. We get curious about what works and what doesn’t, and take this into the next iteration of our creation.

I started exploring other creative rhythms, from Ursula K. Le Guin (schedule below) to Murakami, and what they all share is a schedule.

I stumbled upon an Insta post, ‘A Day in the Life of Brunello Cucinelli’, an Italian luxury creative director, which sounded lush, simple, and delightful (maybe because I dream of a villa in Italy).

I used to bristle at the thought of a fixed schedule. My inner rebel stomped her feet, saying, “What about spontaneity? Allowing life to sweep me off my feet?” But busyness keeps me away from creating.

Writing Welcome to the Creative Club showed me how important routine is for creativity. I had less on my plate then, which helped the blocks fall into place (there were fewer of them).

Now, more pieces have been thrown into the mix, and I get to design a new way of moving and stacking. It signals growth. I’m ready for the next level.

To design a new rhythm and routine, we need to understand what animates it, the values and purpose behind it. My schedule needs to reflect my core values of freedom, creativity, and connection, and my purpose to unleash creativity (mine and others) to build a better world.

But how to place the Tetris blocks of my Fractional Creative Director role for clothing brands out of LA (which I am LOVING), incubating ideas for my next book, writing my newsletter and poems, creative coaching and collabs, working out daily, spending time with family and friends, administrative tasks for Kollektiv Studio and home, meditation and journaling, promoting the book, and let’s not forget laundry (and making sure to actually leave my flat)?

It’s a big, double-wrapped gift sealed with packing tape I need to rip open and organize so I can create space to enjoy and be deeply present as it all unfolds.

So, taking this into account, I created a simplified version of a potential new rhythm, aka schedule.

When I look at this, besides missing the countryside house in Italy, pasta with marinara, and naps, it seems simple, and that's the challenge. Life is not that neat and clean, some days are a right hot mess. Meetings pop out of the blue, fires ignite, shit happens, distractions drag me by the hair.

There's a lot of life missing: learning, financial management, household mundanities, therapy appointments, some social media, step-kiddos, date nights, and curve balls.

I’ll start by implementing this three days a week. Run an experiment. Gather data. Usually, schedules feel tight and restrictive, but the alternative is catching random balls wondering why I don’t get to bat.

When life shifts, which it does frequently if we’re lucky (it means we’re growing), a redesign is needed. Getting curious about what that could look like, how it might reflect what we value most, then taking it for a test drive, is how we creatively direct our next scene.

If you designed an aligned schedule for your next act, what might it look like? What are you setting flame to? What are you calling in? How might it reflect your values?

Hit reply. I could use more inspiration (not just from Italian fashion billionaires and famous writers).

Keep creating,