Is it worth it? by Clare O’Driscoll

'Growth'

Recently, I’ve been spending time updating my website and email list (with support from the brilliant Lucy Rycroft).

It takes me ages - actual eons - to do anything like this, and every time I embark on such projects, there’s this tiny voice deep within, a prodding finger, a tugging at my sleeve from my inner time-manager-cum-critic.

‘Is it worth it?’

Our time is precious. There is such a deep-rooted fear of wasting it in this productivity-mad world. Our brains are wired by society to think this way, like we’re constantly totting up numbers on some kind of metaphorical balance sheet. What will the growth be? Where's the return on our investment of time and love and heartache? After the long slow work of writing, rewriting, editing, the overcoming of fear of tech and sharing, will that tiny seed we’ve planted bear fruit? How long will it take? Will it ever come?

Will it be paid back with the ‘income’ of likes, sales and accolades?

Our creative creator God runs a different economy. An economy of giving without counting the cost. When we work within that, the gain is immeasurable. And those roots we’re delving down deep into the nutrient rich soil of creativity? They will hold us firm, drinking in deep. And we will see growth. Because it’s not about counting the ‘likes’, but about letting our words flow from the good we have already been given.

Some years back when I gave up regular 9-5 work, it was often a challenge to ‘just try’ new things that had no guarantee of success. However, a month or so after leaving my job, I read Paula Gooder’s Everyday God in which she writes about Moses turning aside at the burning bush. There, she asserts the idea that actually, it’s really ok - more than ok - to turn aside and try things even with no certainty of being fruitful and productive. It’s ok to simply give our time to things, to value them for their own sake, not for their future payback.

In the breath of a moment, I was reminded of this again last week as I glanced out of a train window. Turning aside. The view gave me a sudden flash of inspiration, a compulsion to create. And I realised that actually this is the thing.

Maybe the real gift of creativity is not so much the ‘being good at it’ (because much of that is about hard graft anyway).

And it’s definitely not about the likes and accolades.

No, the real gift is in the sudden headrush, the flame of excitement that burns in you when you get a new idea. That feeling, the certainty that you can’t NOT do this. The gift of creativity lies in that moment of magic. The moment an idea dawns on you with an almighty internal ‘Yes!’

The sheer exhilaration of inspiration.

And when we follow that call to create, I do believe it will always bear fruit, even if we never see it. Some of that fruit happens within us, in the writing itself. It is never wasted. Our words are never wasted.

So, was it worth it? Of course it was.

But perhaps that’s not even the right question.

 

Clare O’Driscoll is a language tutor, writer and editor who will drop everything to whizz down to the sea whenever the chance arises.

As a lifelong straggler- behind and sufferer of occupational anxiety, she blogs about work and vocation struggles and how the sea cures these at www.thewaywardfish.com