“I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet.” ― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Creativity Prompt #27: The Beauty of Boring | 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Still life, Juan Gris. Original public domain image from Finnish National Gallery.

Good morning, creatives, writers, artists, thinkers, seekers. I am so honored to be here with you. I am, as I mentioned earlier this week, also almost dizzy with the level of production of complex words and instructions in these prompts over the last twenty-seven days. I even mistyped Kurt Cobain’s name yesterday, which I actually saw as it happened, then somehow forgot to fix until after the post actually went out. That’s a perfect metaphor for my pace this week. I’m literally running to catch up with myself! But I’m also wholly thrilled to say that I did meet with an editor Monday to discuss my craft book concept, and I think it’s all pulling together. Of course I’ll keep you posted!

I’ll also keep you posted about ways to continue your work with creativity long after this challenge ends on Sunday. At Elephant Rock (the small creative writing program I direct), we are expanding our presence on Mighty Networks, where our vision is a virtual school where the “quad” provides a place for everyone to hang out, talk about what they’re working on, ask and answer questions, and did in and out of classes if they wish. We’re even planning a teachers’ lounge! Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, today’s prompt comes once again from Billie Ouellette-Howitz of Dumpster Yoga, who is also my youngest child, and who brought you Prompt #23 on the secret power of “not yet.”

And, with that, I now turn it over to Billie, who brings you today’s prompt on the beauty of boring. Welcome, Billie.

The Beauty of Boring

The funny thing about being alive is that we spend the majority of our time doing the same five or ten things over and over. We wear clothes, they get dirty, we wash them, put them away, wear them again. We buy groceries. We put the groceries away. Cook the food. Eat. Do dishes. 

At the end of each day we lie our imperfect lumpy bodies down and we sleep. Then we do it again. And again.

These routines, the big shapes of life, have stayed mostly the same for thousands and thousands of years. Even if the specifics–how we acquire food and prepare it, or how we clothe our bodies and care for those garments, or the quarters in which we sleep–have changed, the general shapes of our daily activities persist. 

Yet, if you are wired anything like me, each repeating cycle of basic daily tasks comes as something of a revelation, and at times it’s even a shock. For example, I can still find myself baffled on a Sunday morning when all the clothes I wore that week are there, dirty, waiting for me. Or on a weekday afternoon when I’m out of coffee cups and have to run the dishwasher–didn’t I just run it? Or find that the fridge is all at once empty yet again.

Joyce Carol Oates describes these painstakingly simple routines that comprise our  lives in her (admittedly gender-typed) poem, “Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money”: 

Women whose lives are food

breaking eggs with care

scraping garbage from the plates

unpacking groceries hand over hand

Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front

tough plastic with detachable lids

Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7

Friday the shopping mall open till 9

bags of groceries unpacked

hand over certain hand

Men whose lives are money

time-and-a-half Saturdays

the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home

unfolded Monday morning

The thing about my continual shock and bafflement at unpacking the groceries hand over hand, at the garbage truck arriving Thursday morning, at “life being life” is that it creates a low level hum of chaos at all times. I have to expend so much energy simply “keeping up” with all the little tasks that I scarcely have any time or energy left to pause and pursue creative life giving things. 

Except of course, that’s a lie. And we’ll explore that lie–and some strategies for upending it– in today’s prompt. 

The lie of “not enough time” depends upon my belief in a repetitive story I tell myself, the one about being so busy with all the little tasks I don’t have time to be creative. But the truth is, I sometimes let myself get caught up in the “busy.” The truth is, I sometimes like the thrill of chaos and buzz of over-caffeinated. 

The truth is also that there are a million different ways to tell myself a story. 

So, buckle in and hang on, because today’s prompt is about rewriting the story in your head. We will do this in three parts. 

Creativity Prompt #27: The Beauty of Boring