The Power of Patience in the Creative Process: Embracing Flow Over Struggle

Creation is messy, non-linear, and full of surprises. Learn how patience nurtures your creative flow, cultivates resilience, and leads to authentic breakthroughs.

Welcome to The Creative. Twice a month I share quotes from the books, Art is the Highest Form of Hope and The Creative Act. I find perspectives on the creative process to be so meta when it comes to life. We are a creative process and everything we do is subject to the same rules. Creation is non-linear. It's messy. It moves forward and backward. And also gets stuck. Often times we do not realize the purpose of a singular creative process until years later. Creativity likes to surprise us. 

“If there is a rule to creativity that is less breakable than the others, it’s the need for patience is ever-present.” - Rick Rubin

I have a very mixed history with patience. Actually, I’ll come clean here…I hate it. I’m terrible at it, but ultimately it is so good for me. Patience is a very big part of Human Design. No matter an individual’s chart, patience plays a very large role. Whether it is being patient with emotions, patient with initiation, or patience with others, living your Human Design is at its core a practice of patience. I find the patience aspect of Human Design to be the most challenging for my HD clients to get used to but also the most life changing. 

Patience of course is an incredibly necessary part of the creative process. Yet, the patience required here feels different. Part of this patience, for me at least and what I notice with clients, is the patience to know when to put whatever one is working on down. To walk away, and come back another moment, another hour, another day. Sometimes the communication between our hand and heart is just not clean. We are slow, we fumble, we struggle. The effort is enormous. The thing is spirit/soul, whatever you would like to call it hates effort. This kind of struggle, this push and pull, this need to wrestle whatever we are working on to the ground, chases the most valuable part of ourselves away. The part that feeds our creative process. The part that cultivates flow. The part that reminds us over and over again why we do the thing we do. 

I have a podcast - Joy is Now - and a few years ago I was lucky enough to interview the illustrator and author of the beautiful book, Why We Cook, artist LINDSAY GARDNER. We discuss PATIENCE and how it pertains to the creative process, parenthood, and trust all with a little psychology mixed in. I hope you’ll listen (you can do so here), Lindsay has some beautiful insights about how patience has shaped her process. Lindsay is also on Substack! You can join her here. 

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