Rest vs. Rush
“The best type of creativity is not from the place of rush its from the place of rest”
I saw this Instagram reel posted on a story of one of my friends on insta, about a month ago, of Pastor Touré Roberts. It was an exert from a sermon series he was doing called Starting Over. Now at the time, I didn’t watch the sermon, but in this reel, he was saying the creativity comes from the place of rest and not rush. This is something that was on my mind for a while, so I thought I would get my thoughts out.
So naturally, I did a short story that you can still see on my main page @le_lesel, but I wanted to come back to this idea again.
When you think of creatives or too narrow it down the spectrum to artists alone (even though I think everyone is a creative and artist in their own respects, but I digress), who do you think of? Do you think of the greats like; Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and not the ninja turtles lol. People like Picasso or Pollock widen it a bit Motzart, a bit more Shakespeare. Or to bring to modern-day your favourite YouTube, TikToker, Instagram creative, your favourite content creator in general.
There is a huge difference between the greats from the past and your favourite creators of today, and believe it or not, it’s the amount of content they produce. We have all heard the phrase quality over quantity, but that is especially true in the creative realm. I am not talking about the amount of stuff they produce because working on one’s craft means to be creating and making continuously, but the actual amount that is put out to the public to be consumed coupled with the time span between “finish” pieces.
Culture today, with the speed of social media, things go in and out of fashion quicker than one can even blink. This rush and what I would deem as a black whole culture make everyone, especially creatives, feel the need to continuously produce work for the show to stay relevant and stay on the top of everyone’s minds. This fast pace and unforgiving nature are what leads to many of your favourite content creators disappearing for months on end with burnout. I mean, anyone would be tired of posting YouTube videos. 2-3 times a week, heck, I can’t even manage posting once a week on my channel without feeling as if I’m overextending myself and then turn around and feel terrible that I can’t even manage to do that. Well, my case may be different. I’m constantly juggling at least 7-10 different ideas in my head at the same time until I want to crawl in bed and just watch anime….. Yea, my case may be a different type of overextension, but…I mean…. you get the point.
Anyways where was I, the ones that we deemed as greats from the past were able to go months on end, working and perfecting one particular piece without the need to rush to put it out to show. I mean, yes, granted those were “simpler” times most creatives had sponsors of high royal regard that invested in them and their work, so they didn’t have to worry about things like; where their next meal was coming from, paying rent or not being sought after from influential people. But still, Roman wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the mural painted in the Sistine Chapel.
To make anything that lasts and stands the test of time, you cannot, must not rush it.
You need more convincing; alright, I got you. As a creation, all we do is copy our creator. Our creator is God, so let's look at what He did. If you never read the bible or heard the creation story before, I’ll give you the rundown. The first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1, says that God created the heavens and the earth. He created the separation of light and darkness, and that was the end of the first day. The next day He separates the waters creating space between the waters on our ground and in the air calling the separation sky ending the second day. For the next 4 days, God created land and ocean; sun, moon and stars; all the plants on the earth; animals to roam the ground, sea and sky; on the sixth day, He made man. Then we go to chapter 2 it records that God looked at all He created and rested on the 7th day.
Now there are a lot of different things to note, but I’ll pick out a few. First, if He is an all-powerful God, He definitely did not need 6 days to create. He would have Thanos snapped, and everything would have been done easy peasy. But no, He chose to space out intervals of the creation process, not doing too little or too much on any given day.
Not only that, but at the end of each day, He would look over His work and deem that it was good. Once he found that everything is up to measure, then He would end the day. So not only did He rest on the 7th day but also on each day when He reviewed the day's work, so He didn’t have to go back to it in the future declaring that everything was good.
If you have been in church any part of your life, you would hear terms like the sabbath; we don’t do work on Saturday or Sunday (depending on your beliefs). This is a holy rest day. Now, most talk direct that to the regular workweek and things of that nature, but that can be put on an everyday process, especially to creatives.
We need time to sit with our work, review, and meditate to see mistakes to fix sentences. When we work in the dark and work from a place of rest, we give ourselves the grace to explore to try new things, this gives us the grace to mess up, make mistakes, look at things from new angles, try styles, and this can be implemented in all areas of our life but especially true of those who work in highly creative industries in any capacity. We need to be constantly exploring and feeding our creative side to come up with new ideas.
“We are the Hands of God”
Obviously, being Christian myself, these times of exploration and meditation (these times of rest/darkness) are spent with my creator. I have no idea when I started saying this statement, but I say that we are the hands of Christ. Meaning just like God created from nothing into something, we do the same. We create from thoughts, ideas and concepts and produce tangible, recognizable images, objects and sounds that allow people to interact, feel and understand.
If we are creatives because God was creative, that means we produce something on this earth that He wants to be shown. If we want anything to last, it needs to be procured from the rest and not rush; otherwise, it will not stand the test of time, and we don’t want that to be our legacy.
