How Embracing Change Fuels Creative Practice
Best-selling author Brad Stulberg on expectations, rugged flexibility, identity and more
“A central narrative in our culture urges us to seek stability, yet this doesn’t reflect the reality that change is constant—and that, with the right skills, it can be a dramatic force for growth.” —Brad Stulberg, Master of Change
Preview: Episode 97 Brad Stulberg on Embracing Change and Creative Practice
How might your expectations for your creative practice actually interfere with your creativity? Why is exploring and prioritizing things other than your creative practice essential to your creative practice and overall wellbeing? What does it mean to “be in conversation” with change, and why is that essential? And how might a “rugged flexibility” make a major difference in your creative work? We talk about all this and more with best-selling author Brad Stulberg.
Brad Stulberg is the bestselling author of Master of Change and The Practice of Groundedness. He writes for The New York Times and is on faculty at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
I so love the wacky and bizarrely talented Jacob Collier … and his new song, “Little Blue,” featuring Brandi Carlisle, opens my heart up so wide I am absolutely puddled weeping. (I know, surprise, surprise.) So much love in these lyrics, in this arrangement, in the video that is somehow so full of hope—a musical remedy for despair. It’s like Rumi meets Where the Wild Things Are. I love pretty much every line of the song, including “You’re gonna find a way to carry the weight of the world.” If you don’t yet know Jacob’s story or about his crazy and fabulous way of seeing (and hearing) the world and singing it back, well, you’re welcome … check this out. Prepare for your mind to be blown.
If you are going through a tough time and want a book that makes you think, yeah, I’m going to get through this,” I recommend Staying Power 2: Writing from a Year of Emergence by Phyllis Cole-Dai (Episode 91 on Mindfulness). With humor, practicality, tenderness and deep humanity, she shares essays, poems, lists and stories about how good has emerged from difficult situations. It’s a book of extraordinary openness and invitation.
I have loved reading The Chance of Home, a collection of original poems from renowned Rilke translator Mark. S. Burrows. These are poems that weave back and forth between many flavors of song and silence, between what can be seen and the mystery that can not, between light and dark, between the longing to hold and the imperative to let go. It’s a book of beauty, honoring the natural world and the world of family. And most of all, it’s a book of love.
Christie:
Rappers have stopped writing, wait — what?? This little video is a fascinating window into the creative process of rappers and how technology has changed it. The video explains how rappers are now “Punching in” versus writing it down —“It’s improvisational versus writing the stand-up piece,” one rapper says.
I love Tim Kreider’s essays, and this one, “The Unspeakably Sad Reminder of the ‘Other Paris,” hit me hard. It’s about watching yourself and your loved ones wither and age, how we try to keep this inevitability invisible for as long as possible. It’s about reaching the point in your life when “You begin to appreciate the unsung pleasure of not hurting.”
Our audio engineer, Leah, pointed me to this piece about writer friends holding eachother up. “Undergirding every conversation I had was a common desire to ensure that other writers can not only survive, but thrive in an industry that increasingly reduces the value of creativity to sales numbers. As sales figures turn artists into numbers, a fitting reaction is for artists to treat one with a greater sense of humanity, to create friendships and communities defined by enthusiasm and mutual aid. And perhaps most importantly, these relationships are what help writers thrive.”
Never the Same
Sometimes a person wakes
believing they are a storm.
It’s hard to deny it, what,
with all the rain pouring out
of the gutters of the mind,
all the gusts blowing through,
all the squalls, all the gray.
But by afternoon, it seems obvious
they are a garden about to sprout.
By night, it is clear they are a moon—
luminous, radiant, faithful.
That’s the danger, I suppose,
of believing any frame.
Let me believe, then, in curiosity,
in wonder, in change.
Let me trust how essential it is
to stumble into the trough
of the unknown, marvel how
trough becomes wings becomes
faith becomes math. Let me trust
uncertainty is a sacred path.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
A Note About Paid Subscriptions:
First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.
This week, we speak with Brad about why being sleepy can be good for your muse, how collaboration can be an essential component of solo projects, and three fabulous bits of received wisdom about creative practice. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
Your thoughts on change?
What does it mean to be a creative person? Why do you care about that?
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