No one else is responsible for us not doing stuff
When we find we’re not doing the work we really want to do, the creative work we say we really want to do, we make excuses. Or if we have not yet found what it is that will make our lives feel worthwhile, then we make excuses as to why we have given up the search.
We tell ourselves we don’t have the time or the money. Or we make life choices that, we tell ourselves, have cut off creative opportunities: we start a relationship, we have children, we take on a new job. And then we complain that these new responsibilities now prevent us from investigating our creative work, safe in the knowledge that the choice has been taken away from us.
But these are all excuses. I told myself that I no longer needed to write as much, when I had children, because I now had responsibilities. Somehow it was partly my children’s fault that I was using them as an excuse. I remember my mum telling me that she turned down a job in Switzerland in order to stay and marry my dad and have a family, and my mum was using her choice to have children as an excuse. But these were her, and my, choices and somewhere in our subconscious we were relieved that this closed off other more unknown, more scary choices.
We must all make life decisions at various times. But they are our decisions alone, and whoever makes demands on our lives after such a decision, they are not responsible for our lack of creative work. Excuses are just excuses. Just get on with it. Just make stuff.
