A Devotional Practice for Creatives to Stay Curious

After forty years of swinging between structure and chaos, I've learned that both discipline and spontaneity are essential, and dangerous in excess.

Too many uninterrupted weeks of efficient process and healthy habits will eat me alive. When I get in a groove with a meaningful streak of productive living, the diligent discipline and responsible boundaries that once felt empowering begin to calcify around me like prison walls. The dopamine high from those early victories evaporates and what started as well-intentioned self-improvement becomes just... my day. My boring fucking day. A sterile, output-driven existence where the dishes are always clean, the house perpetually tidy, my inbox forever at zero, I’m full of expensive vitamins and managed to walk 10,000 steps but for what?

I need structure or I go insane. Not quirky-cute manic-pixie insane, but "blow up my life to go run a sketchy goat farm in Kathmandu" insane. Structure keeps you safe, yet too much starves the soul.

I imagine a grotesque little gremlin in my gut that feeds off creativity. When starved, he claws at my entrails, screaming: “Quit your job, book that spontaneous trip, pick a fight, let’s get tattoos, maybe try heroin!” After decades of coexisting with this creature, I've learned to catch his rage early and lull him back to sleep with small offerings. A visit to the art gallery, a new book, sometimes just an exciting new condiment can afford us enough flavour and intrigue that I can live to see another day without buying a houseboat or enrolling in military combat classes.

In middle age, feeding the gremlin has become a habit itself: structured unstructured time devoted to dreams and inspiration is a daily requirement. Without that space, we default to formulaic patterns and lock ourselves in a prison of shoulds, wondering why our achieved goals feel so muted, flat and soulless.

This is a call to action: to separate from the predictable and reconnect with wonder. Curate a diet of creative consumption and schedule time to feast and to just fuck around!!

Visualize Your Dreams Create a visual collage - physical or digital - that captures where you want to go, or how you’re feeling in this chapter. It doesn't need to be perfect; it needs to be yours, just a mess of moods that makes you feel something. Add images, quotes, colour schemes, textures, anything that captures the essence of what you're discovering or what’s next. Right now I devote time after my morning affirmations to a Pinterest board called "House of Leaves" and you better believe it is unhinged, just surreal enough to prime my mind to attune to the unexpected for the rest of the day.

Move Through the Mud At least one night a week I catch myself mindlessly sedated in a YouTube spiral, lobotomized by radical feminist TikTok compilations. An hour disappears in what feels like fifteen minutes, and I realize I've been taken, I'm the algorithm’s zombie, and I need to stop and open up the inner channels to come back to life. I shut down the TV, my work email, the social feeds, then I fire up the voice memo app on my phone and just start talking. Where am I at, what am I feeling, what do I need, it all comes out.

Talk through what you're feeling for 10-15 minutes. You'll catch the thread to what's bottlenecking your energy, be it resentment, fear, overwhelming obligations, a lack of passion. See it, name it, move through it.

Study Other Artists When you're trapped in the echo chamber of your own experience, other artists offer an escape route. They've wrestled with the same demons, heartbreaks, and existential spirals but from completely different vantage points, with different tools, through different lenses. They've also captured those moments of pure elation, overwhelming gratitude, and cosmic connection. The experiences that make you feel like you're on the “good” drugs.

Get curious about your feelings from another perspective. Get curious about feelings you have no touchpoint to in this moment. Connect with love if you're feeling hate, dive into a somber puddle of old blues tunes if a grounding dose of grief is what you need. Let other artists show you the full spectrum of human experience, not just what you're stuck in right now.

This isn't just about inspiration, it's about transcendence. See how Chagall painted lovers floating above villages, how Tarkovsky filmed grief, how Johnny Cash sang about redemption, and your personal experience becomes part of a bigger conversation, and you take a moment to open up to what I like to call “the big life stuff”.

Take Rabbit Hole Sessions Follow one fascinating thread wherever it leads. Start with a single question about yourself, or a sticky theme from your day, or a random fun fact, then let curiosity guide you through articles, documentaries, interviews.

I carve out 15-20 minutes each morning while getting ready for the day to explore something completely out of the realm of my usual happenings. I'll prop my iPad on the bathroom counter and dive into YouTube videos while doing my makeup and brushing my teeth - old gangs of New York, Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index, or this morning's gem: a five-minute exploration of edible bugs around the world. Apparently, centipedes taste like shrimp and flying ants taste like pork rinds. The more you know 🌠

Check Your Competition Weekly touch points with competitors keep you proactive. Once a week (Friday afternoons, in fact) I run reports on my competitors. How are their shows performing? What are they booking? Have they done anything embarrassing lately? I check on the new formats and concepts my favourite venues are experimenting with. This might sound too "productive," and I'll admit it's a habit I can justify scheduling on company time, but it doesn't send me spiralling into granular to-do lists. If anything, I'm inspired to fire off cold emails and connect with new names that uncover new leads. I'm not just sitting by waiting for someone to tell me what to work on, I'm not just reheating the same old tired shit every day, year over year, I'm making time to get curious about my position, leverage, and unconventional opportunities.

Interview Adventures Reach out to people with expertise you'd love to learn more about. Reach out to people making cool shit. Most folks are eager to share their stories, you just have to ask.

The key is asking specific, thoughtful questions rather than generic ones. Instead of "Tell me about your job," ask "What's the most surprising thing about working in junk yard that outsiders would never realize?"

Been wondering how people get to their shift at the gas station on the ocean? Call the floating Chevron. Want to know if American Apparel legitimately trademarked the term “PantyTime™”? Email their legal department. Spent 30 consecutive days eating Oreos at lunch and you’re feeling bold enough to inquire as to whether or not this deems you eligible for Nabisco sponsorship? Pull up that contact form! Dying to know about the logistics around the barbecue donut episode of Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade’s hit show Gadget Man? Track down engineer Chris Payne and he WILL write you back. Wondering if that meat cloning lab has considered producing dinosaur steaks, jurassic park style? I checked, they’re not. They’re really leaving money on the table if you ask me.

Go Out Into the Real World Visit spaces that might inspire your next eureka - museums, neighbourhoods, libraries, archives, or atmospheric spots like coffee shops, speakeasies, or diners. A new physical environment can unlock perspectives and sensory details you'd never discover through Google Chrome.

Pay attention to the unexpected. Spend an afternoon in a restored Art Deco hotel lobby, feeling the weight of the brassy fixtures, listening to how voices bounce-about in the high-ceilinged spaces. Visit a small town and notice how people interact. What's posted on community bulletin boards? are the streets clean? What does lunch cost around here? What music is playing in the grocery store?

Sit in Stillness Turn off the lights. Lie on the floor. See what shows up, what starts swirling around in the darkness. If silence terrorizes you, put on a record, listen to the subtle tones you've never noticed before, really make space for the lyrics, the mood, the spaces between notes. Create conditions where your subconscious can surface, where your mind can process ideas that have been quietly brewing in the background. Breathe. Drift. Vibe.

Time to check in. Is your Gremlin grumbling? Sitting in the corner booth of your consciousness, chain-smoking and drumming his fingers on the table, waiting for you to acknowledge what you both already know: that all your beautiful systems, your pristine routines, your record breaking output, and your carefully curated life is just scaffolding around the REAL stuff. Feed the Gremlin, take him somewhere unexpected. Buy him a strange meal (seems like the kind of guy that would be into those centipedes that taste like shrimp). Let him tell you stories about places you've never been. The dishes will still need washing when you get back, the emails will pile up, but you'll return with something empty productivity can’t manufacture, with an awareness that you're alive, curious, and still capable of being surprised by the world.

Photo by Danny Greenberg on Unsplash