Wasting Time

I bet every person who has ever created anything—a song, a book, a piece of art, a business— has wondered if they’re wasting their time. It’s a horrible feeling when you wonder that. Makes your face heat up as you suddenly picture your self working for hours and hours, knowing that you could have used that time in some other way. Possibly a more productive way. This is the hurdle every person comes up against when they’re creating something.

I think it’s because creation always starts with something invisible. A painting is nothing at first. Nothing except an idea, which is a big invisible something. And if the painter believes the idea is “something” then it will become a visible something. If they fear that their idea is “nothing”— labeling their work as a waste of time— it will truly become nothing, not even an idea.

Sometimes I wonder how many beautiful things that have encouraged me along the way, would have never come to exist if the creators of those things had sat in doubt for too long. I wonder how many times JRR Tolkien felt suddenly afraid he was wasting his time as he created his make-believe Elven language, and map of a world that didn’t exist anywhere but his own mind. Once he really got going, he was probably fine, because people around him must have cheered him on when they saw how wonderful his ideas looked on paper. But what about before there was anything to show? 

I remember one time a thirteen year old girl came up to me and asked, “how did you learn to paint like that?” I told her I’d been working on it all my life. She responded with great passion, “I want to paint like that!”  “Wonderful!” I said, “It just takes passion plus a lot of hours.” She looked unhappy, and said, “But I want to paint like that now!” 

The hard part of creating something is that you have to start where you are, and that’s often a small place that feels insignificant. And each small step is a battle of “wasting time”. I learned to paint by spending untold hours dying my single Easter Egg while everyone else dyed a dozen, and sketching my teachers and classmates in high school notebooks that I threw away at the end of the year, and staying up late playing with water colors for no apparent reason, and cutting elaborate designs out of construction paper to make notecards for friends, and spending crazy amounts of time on visual aids for book reports where the visual aids didn’t count for many points. Wasting time is fun, once you get over the idea of it. It’s also essential for mastering something, and it’s a battle that’s never too early or too late to start fighting. I fight it all the time.  

This month I’ve been participating in Inktober— an instagram challenge where I’m illustrating one word a day. I’ll be honest, it feels like a huge waste of time. And based on my experience, that’s a good indication that I’m on the right track.

I hope you all have a lovely week. Now, go waste some time!

~Amy