Dear Artist who has never experienced "flow"
Creative work without flow is still creative work. The making done in full wakefulness knows things the effortless work never had to learn.
Dear artist who has read descriptions of flow and found nothing in them that resembles what you know,
Dear weaver who has watched the hours pass, every thread chosen consciously, every decision made by someone who was fully awake for all of it,
Dear sculptor who has never once lost track of time at the work, who has always known exactly how long you have been there,
Dear photographer who waits and adjusts and tries again, aware through every moment of the session, and who has wondered why making has never felt the way the interviews describe,
Dear ceramicist whose hands know the clay and whose mind has stayed fully present through every hour of the knowing,
Dear poet who has arrived at every line through effort and deliberation and the fatigue of a mind that was there for all of it,
Dear printmaker who has been fully, relentlessly awake for every session of making you have ever had,
Dear human who suspects, in quiet moments, that something about the absence of this described experience is yours to explain,
This is for you.
Please know first that what you are describing, the making that requires your full conscious presence for every moment of it, is the experience of a very large number of artists on a very large number of days. The accounts that suggest otherwise are amplified. The silence around your experience is just silence.
You know what creative work without flow feels like from the inside. The self that stays. The awareness of the choices as you make them. The considering and reconsidering, the noticing of what landed before you have even moved on. The sessions where the clock was never lost and time never warped and you were always, entirely, there. The fatigue afterward, the kind that belongs to someone who was present for all of it.
When other artists describe creative states that sound like disappearing into the work, it is possible you have wondered if you were doing something wrong. If there was a door they had found that you had been missing. If the accounts described something available to anyone who cared enough, which would mean the absence was evidence of something.
Please know that the absence says something about conditions rather than about you.
The making you have been doing requires a nervous system willing to quiet the part of itself that monitors and watches and stays alert. For many artists, that part stays active. It has been learned. It has been useful. The body has decided it serves a purpose. It stays during creative sessions because it stays during most things, and it competes with the kind of absorption that flow describes. For artists navigating anxiety, hypervigilance, chronic pain, or any number of other health experiences, creative work simply unfolds in the presence of that monitoring rather than in its absence. The monitoring is the body doing what it has learned to do. The absence of flow is a description of that, and nothing else.
What I want to say, and what I find is almost never said, is that the presence you bring to your work, that relentless, unrelenting, conscious being-there, produces something. It leaves marks on what gets made.
The artist who has never disappeared into the work has been there for every single moment of it. Every choice made consciously. Every decision examined. Every word or mark or note arrived at by someone who was fully awake throughout. That wakefulness is in the work. The decisions made through full awareness rather than through effortless discovery carry that awareness in them. The sessions that required presence throughout, that asked for the whole of you and received it, carry the evidence of that requiring.
There are things the work done through full consciousness knows that effortless absorption cannot produce, because effortlessness did not need to discover them. The hard-won choice. The line that was tried six ways before it arrived. The mark made by someone who was watching it land. These are forms of knowledge specific to making in full wakefulness, and they belong to you.
What if the work you have been making, through all those sessions of unrelenting presence, has been shaped by that presence in ways you have been too tired to fully see? What if the quality of attention you have been bringing, session after session, has been leaving something in the work that ease could never have left there?
Please know that what you have built, through all those fully conscious, effortful hours, is a practice that knows how to function under the conditions that actually exist for you. That is a form of creative knowledge that effortlessness would never have produced, because effortlessness never had to discover it.
The making done in full wakefulness, in the relentless presence of the self and its awareness, is real making. The artist doing it is a real artist. And the years of creative work without flow, the years of never once getting to disappear, have produced something that transcendence could never have reached: the specific intelligence of someone who has always been entirely there for every moment of what they made.
Love,
Kathryn