Chasing contentment …

Most of the time, we don’t notice contentment. It is quiet and undemanding, and therefore rather easy to miss.

Discontent is much more attention-seeking. It arrives dressed as comparison, expectation, ambition, novelty, envy. We look at what somebody else has or done and, almost without meaning to, decide that our own version could do with a little improvement. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the wanting things itself. A nicer house, more money, a new car, a little recognition, these can all make life more enjoyable. The trouble is that pleasure is remarkably good at becoming normal. Yesterday’s luxury becomes today’s expectation, and the excitement quietly moves elsewhere. Perhaps what we are really acquiring is not the thing itself but the habit of looking for the next buzz.

And we do much the same in creative life. We look sideways at people whose work seems more assured, more accomplished, more effortless. We imagine they possess some quality we have somehow missed: confidence, clarity, certainty. We want some of it for ourselves, but certainty is a short-lived pleasure. Before long, we are comparing again.

Perhaps the more useful question is not How can I be more like them? but What is mine? What do I actually want to make, say or explore? And that question changes things. It gives us permission to stop trying to produce a consistent version of ourselves. To work abstractly one day and realistically the next. To draw, sculpt, stitch or write. To change our minds. To make something simply because we are interested in it, rather than because it resembles something somebody else has already done, looks pretty or receives a compliment.

And there is something reassuringly helpful and uncomplicated about making things with our hands. The feel of the material, the repetition of a stitch, the movement of a pencil or brush: these small physical acts demand our attention. They leave rather less room for the endless commentary in our heads.

For a while, we stop looking sideways. We are simply there, making something. And perhaps that is where the interesting things begin…..