creative constraint

You might enjoy listening to this music while reading today’s post.

Earlier this week, a group of us got together by video. We last saw each other a month ago, in person, at an annual gathering outside of Boston. Now back in our everyday lives, dotted across the US, Europe, and Australia, we regrouped to see how everyone was getting along.

Several people said they had been feeling exhausted since our week together. Their remarks reminded me of an unfinished blog I started back in February. I’d intended it as my inaugural post for this website but left it incomplete.

Pure tired drapes itself across my shoulders – like a duvet I drag from place to place. I’m even tired of mentioning I’m tired. But despite this gravitational pull, as I wade through my days, these past months have otherwise been kind to me. I’m caught in a good mood. I view my mild but continual exhaustion with more equanimity than I usually muster. Normally I regard an energy crash as a certain sign that death is imminent. But on this occasion, I have a less alarming explanation: my recent laser eye surgery.

In most cases recovery is so swift as to be shocking – with stories of patients waking the next day, removing their eye goggles to a wonderous world booming with colour and the crisped precision of glorious detail. Instead, I woke to blurry. 

Initially, I assumed my eyes would take a few days to settle. But then the surgeon explained he corrected both eyes differently – on purpose – with one lasered to see far and the other, near. Now, it’s just a matter of “staying positive” he said, while the brain rejigs itself and trains each eye to its new perspective. This takes weeks if not months. Maybe a year. It’s hard to tell.

I feel as if I am wearing one contact lens. And there’s nothing I can do about it. There are no glasses to make this lopsidedness right. Had I known this in advance I would’ve struggled to go through with the surgery.

Fatigue is to be expected, the doctor assured me. All this visual rewiring, the many hours of squinting through blur, saps gallons of energy.

But being in a good mood lately, I’ve noticed that, weirdly, tired serves me. Tired has made me stop work on a string of long essays. Instead, I have finally turned to pieces short enough to complete. Tired nagged me to submit a series of thirty-page assignments for my coaching course days in advance – knowing that my energy had become too unreliable to be trusted with tight deadlines.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed – my usual state of being, reliant on coffee and cortisol, Tired rubs away that edginess. I am no longer frazzled. I feel like a productive slug.

In the end, I didn’t publish these thoughts. Instead, I kicked off my new blog a month or so later with a post about essaying. But scribbling down my ideas about Tired left me appreciating:

exhaustion can enable creative constraint.

Restriction makes some things, and not all things, possible. When less is possible, we get the chance to become better choosers. If we only have one hour, a single piece of paper, a three-hundred-word limit, two hundred centimeters of space, ten Euro in our pocket – what becomes possible springs from what is not.

Ever since I gave Tired its due, I notice similar points about much larger problems:

• Sander Tideman explains that capitalism focuses solely on growth – on production and consumption, relentlessly depleting all of life’s resources. Sustainability combines efficiency with a resilience that demands cycles of fallow. “Resilient systems are typically characterized by the very features – diversity and redundancy, or slack – that efficiency seeks to destroy.”

• The activist Miki Kashtan also argues for honouring our limits: Our modern way of living is “based on forcing living beings, including both humans and non-human life, to conform to practices of extraction that are rooted in mistrust of life and that lead to ongoing scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. Any time we choose, instead, to honour the limits of our own and others’ capacity, we realign with life, on however small a scale.”

I also mentioned on our call this week that those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have entered the dark side of the year as we head toward the shortest day. Samhain, the Irish for November, marks the end of harvest and beginning of winter. During this season many of us will surrender to Tired.

Whether through the seasons or our individual rhythms, Tired brings necessary blessings, and suggests exhausted (to drain out) as a pathway. When we stop all the Doing, go fallow, we not only rest, and renew, we also receive. Sprigs of fresh ambition prepare themselves with instructions whispered when we are sleepy and ready for dreams.

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Since it accompanies today’s theme, at the top of this post I share my favourite piece of piano music. Bach’s aria belongs to a collection called the Goldberg Variations. In it, Bach constrained his composition to variations of one similar harmonic foundation. He wrote the series in 1741 at the request of the Ambassador of Russia, a sickly man in need of “smooth but somewhat lively” medicinal music to keep him cheerful through his many sleepless nights.
Listen here.

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