On the value of baseline security (a.k.a 'monotony')
Why discipline can be about ease and security, not struggle.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
- Gustave Flaubert
Discipline is a word that haunts a creative practice. There’s this feeling that if you could just nail your routine - just become disciplined enough - you’d be twice as productive. All could be unlocked because you are now a sharpened tool in service of creation.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I resume a ‘normal’ everyday life practice after having been off travelling. And I think I’ve come to the idea that this way of thinking about discipline places some of its benefits in the wrong place.
While the discipline of showing up is always necessary to actually getting work done, there is another benefit to the potential monotony of a routine. Summarised, I think, in the words of Flaubert who suggested that regularity and order in life frees up space to put your creativity where you might feel it matters most: in your work.
As with everything, this isn’t a matter of one thing suiting all contexts. So I wanted to dig in: what might monotony offer us as artists?
Struggles vs needs
Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.
- Salvador Dalí
We’ve got an image of an artist as a bohemian that is absolutely valid. The idea being that this person exists outside the contours of normal human everyday life precisely because they work to access something outside of normal human everyday life. They’re ‘of us’ while being ‘not us’ in some sense.
Here’s my confession: I’ve never really been much of a party animal. I consider myself an energetic person, a person who loves to talk to people and share ideas, who can certainly put away her fair share of a bottle of wine, etc. But I don’t have an addictive personality, and I don’t have a strong desire to party for days on end. Part of it is that I’ve never been that drawn to being subsumed - I don’t really engage with this lifestyle because I don’t really want to turn off my senses, forget myself, lose control, etc, on a regular basis. It’s not always a good thing; I absolutely have trouble ‘letting go’ sometimes. And I’m fussy. I like knowing where my things are. I like fresh sheets on my bed and a cup of coffee when I wake up each morning. There is something in the ritual of simply making a cup of coffee every day, in the exact same way, that is comforting and important and that signals to my brain it’s time to get started. This is not unique to me. In the choice between total chaos or making my cup of coffee, I will, boring as it may sound, choose the coffee.
I have felt for a while that this idea of the artist as an unhinged party person is only part of the picture. As often as it suggests openness and energy and flexibility (all very important qualities for creating), it can as often be used as an excuse for why we underpay, undervalue and trauma-mine our artists. Suggesting that a lack of stability and ease is ‘essential struggle’ is very old school, and while you might glamourise this, it can be worth sparing a thought for those who might genuinely suffer with this model. To quote Ursula Le Guin, this is a concept that:
[has] religion at its foundation: it is the idea that the artist must sacrifice himself for his art.
I had a family member once say to me that if I was ‘really serious’ about making art, I’d go live in a garage somewhere and eat nothing but pot noodle. To that, I say, no thank you. I think I’m allowed to want three square meals and a bed, while I write. I don’t think that’s actually asking too much. We will need play and disruption, but do artists have to go without food or shelter as a prerequisite? Does their mental health have to be completely sacrificed at the altar of art-making? I’m not sure.
In other words, I think there are good and bad kinds of stability. I’ve spoken before about the importance of acquiring a tolerance for uncertainty. But that tolerance is a spectrum. Leaning into chaos can get you pushing the right boundaries when you need to, in certain moments. But you’re also entitled to a baseline of security, if that is what you need. I have never felt that I made my best work when I was stressed about my landlord refusing to fix a boiler or wondering where my next pay check was coming from. If anything, these anxieties took up valuable brain space I could have been using to create.
Acquiring mesmerism or flow
The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
Haruki Murakami
Having said all of this, it’s also not true that a routine or habit will necessarily enable you to create on demand. I still take inspiration from an early writing teacher of mine, Dr Kerry Ryan, who advised on the importance of being able to write ‘like a war correspondent.’ I’ve always taken this to heart, believing in the importance of ensuring mood or other factors didn’t interfere with my practice. If I don’t execute the routine perfectly, that does not give me a pass from my practice. This leaves some space for chaos - and if it comes along, which it will, it shouldn’t get in the way of my work.
Thus there is value in creating some kind of baseline ease with which the work can get done. Much like Steve Jobs and his infamous turtlenecks, we want to limit the number of extraneous decisions or other undefined factors that might detract from the main work we are trying to do. I don’t want to spend time wondering where I’m waking up tomorrow. I want to go straight to the page. I want to do as much as I can to engage in ‘flow’. To quote the description given by the expert on the concept of “flow”:
My mind isn’t wandering. I am not thinking of something else. I am totally involved in what I am doing. My body feels good. I don’t seem to hear anything. The world seems to be cut off from me. I am less aware of myself and my problems.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
So much of this, it is argued, is wrapped up in privilege - but the fact that we often frame it that way is itself a problem, I think. It’s not a privilege to have your basic needs met. It also doesn’t make you a boring artist if you set up a routine that makes getting to work easier each day. The journey is a long one and will require you to keep showing up. Making that ‘easier’ doesn’t mean you ‘cheated’ at discipline. You’re still showing up. By having the baseline sorted, by being orderly in our lives, there is room to create bigger and more imaginative worlds in the work precisely because we are freed from other concerns.
Art-making is so much about holding contradictions in tandem. The new versus the known. The uncertain versus the certain. The stable and the chaotic. There will always be a balancing that must be engaged with in order to create the conditions. Discipline says that you will show up, no matter the percentage breakdown of each of these contradictions you hold. But just as many artists have found freedom in setting down a few secure elements, monotony (or, more charitably, mesmerism) can be the key to unlocking more work produced over time. To quote Murakami again, writing is ‘closer to manual labour’. He says:
The whole process… requires far more energy over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s gruelling dynamic labour going on inside you.
We can do a lot to make this ‘gruelling’ endeavour less ‘gruelling’. After all, productivity isn’t just about quantity. It is also about quality. And the quality of our lives is part of this process.
How do any of us ensure we are moved, day by day, to keep on making?
I’d love to know how you do it.
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx