Right now, I am in mid-air and over Denver, Colorado. So far, I have spent 20 out of the 23 weeks this year working out of town. I am just returning from painting sets for an immersive experience. Before that, I was painting sets for live music events. I will be home in less than 8 hours and hopefully finishing this post at my kitchen table. As a person who enjoys traveling, I am excited at the thought of being stop motion for a moment. To be in my own space with my things and maybe wear some of clothes from my closet, not just the ones in my backpack.

All these things bring me to my most current contemplation this year: work/life balance levels. Is there such a thing as a work/life balance for a creative person? All I do is create. It’s like I can’t not. I fully function on the daily in creative mode. I wake up thinking about how I want to create my day. I drink my coffee in the mug I created. I sit down to down write and get distracted by thoughts of a painting I want to do. I get so many creative thoughts I always have a notebook beside me. An actual physical one and the one on my phone.

Only when I fill a notebook or my phone needs more storage, I take on the dreaded task of organizing the ideas, and much like a closet, I decide what to keep and toss. I call it my own creative collective. Why do I do this? Because I read somewhere once that a creative’s biggest fear is they will lose the idea, and it will never come back to them. I put all my ideas down in some format. That way, they can always be found. It calms my mind. It allows me to keep processing new ideas without the fear I will forget that “great idea” I had. There have been so many, believe me (insert eye roll here).

I take all the ideas and put them in one folder and date it. I usually look for running themes because I do have them. For example, writing The House Sitting Guide. This idea came up again and again. After ten years, it was made. Life happens like this. Deciding which ideas and creative projects are worth saving is always challenging. I want them all to come to actuality, but I must be realistic about what I can and cannot take on creatively. So decisions are made and prioritized.

For better or worse, I am not out to rush any creative idea I have. I get pulses and insights, sometimes dreams, and other times full-on bouts of days filled with an inability to stop creating. I keep showing up for it, and it keeps coming. I allow it and get overwhelmed by it at times. I have no idea what it feels like to bored. If anything I feel the opposite. As if there is so much I want to make I would never have enough time! Can you relate to that?

Because of this, I adopted a mantra this week: If you have to justify it, then you have to let it go. As it turns out, what I want to justify the most is my existence and reasons for doing the creative things I do. I want to justify my reasons for not doing creative things too. Especially when I have been on the road for an extended period of time. It is easy to say, tomorrow…when I think of sitting down to write this. It is easy to say I will start fresh next week. Just as easy as it is to say, I will start right now.

So to answer my own contemplation, I am not so sure I have a good work/life balance going on. I want to say I am poised at the perfect center of both, but it looks more like this:

I like to think that what I have is a creative essence plugged into an ethical circuit of creative juice from a higher source. Or better yet, what if I am the balance to that higher source…placed here on earth to execute all her musings? A creative puppet. If you don’t understand any of what I just wrote venture on over to listen to one of the best talks on creativity I have ever heard. You might agree.

Tell me, what do you continually rationalize instead of just letting go? I want to hear from you in the comments below!