POST #166: SOLITUDE AND THE NEED FOR UNINTERRUPTED TIME

If you want to become a really good artist, musician, writer, scientist – If you want to do creative work in any field, you need a distraction free environment and an unlimited period of unbroken time. There are people who claim they can create in chaos but I don’t believe them. Some can work with distraction around them, but not create. If you want to be innovative in any field, you must arrange your life so that when ideas finally begin to flow, you can stay with them as long as necessary. EVERY creative person I know,or have read about, insists on solitude without interruptions. If you have to stop to put wash in the dryer or answer the phone, the FLOW is lost, often never to be retrieved. You will be amazed at the difference unbroken time makes in the quality of your work. If you’re writing poetry for example, you can’t get up every ten minutes to check your e-mail, or answer the phone; it disrupts the rhythm of what you are doing and you have to start all over again. Not everybody has a life they can control that way, but if you can’t fully immerse yourself in your work for a distraction free period of time, nothing terribly new and interesting is going to happen and you are going to do the same old, same old again. That’s why so many creative people stop being creative once they achieve success. The phone keeps ringing; they have to give talks, go to parties, be celebrities, etc.,etc. They probably did their most significant work before becoming famous. The smart ones know how to protect their “flow” and, like Philip Roth with his writing cabin in the woods can keep coming up with new ideas into old age.

When you start looking at the lives of “geniuses,” most seem to have done their best creative work when young. I don’t believe it’s age that stops the flow of ideas, it’s the obligations of a mature life (marriage, children) coupled with the distractions of worldly success. Einstein did his most innovative work before he became a celebrity. I’ve read that most math geniuses made their discoveries when they were young (and had lots of undisturbed time). Artists like Picasso might live in social turmoil during the day but do their creative work at night when no one is around. I remember reading a biography of the artist Philip Guston, one of my favorites. He would lock himself in his home studio and (despotically) insist on total silence in the house. His long suffering wife and children were ordered never to make as sound; no phone calls or visitors were allowed, anything that would disrupt the flow of the “great man at work” was forbidden. And it paid off with the best, most creative art of his life.

And here I am, in later years, turning out work that is far beyond my – or anyone else’s - expectations. Why? I think it’s because I live alone. I can be in the studio for as long as I want, whenever I want. I don’t have to make conversation or dinner. I can allow the flow of my painting to be uninterrupted leading me into paths I never imagined. I can think clearly, sequentially, without distraction. For some unexplained reason, the Universe has given me the gift of uninterrupted  time and I am determined to make the most of it.

Renee Kahn