‘Creating’ as an alternative to ‘thriving’
Something I hear often is that the phrase ‘thriving, not surviving’ feels so unattainable to most people under the current conditions that it almost sounds trite.
There’s a certain cynical laugh in response to the very idea of flourishing that quips: “Tell me one person who is thriving at the moment, genuinely.”
In a dominant culture obsessed with eternal youth and individualistic wellness - which frames health and wellbeing as personal achievements rather than the result of a complex conditions (largely outside your control) - aspiring to be thriving, well or joyful can feel like additions to a never-ending to-do list.
In my workshops, I people often say a variation of “I just need to get better at managing my feelings”. It always takes me a beat when I hear someone say that because it breaks my heart a little every time. Here is why:
Your feelings are not some inconvenience that needs to be ‘managed’ - that is patriarchy trying to dismiss feeling people as unreliable, hysterical or even dangerous.
Your feelings are vital sources of information - if we could simply think our way out of the pile of crises we’re in, someone would have figured it out by now.
Your feelings are a sign that you are alive and still have some humanity left in you - the point of overwhelming us with a constant stream of violence and destruction is to desensitise us so that we eventually stop resisting the fascist, colonial AI take-over that’s unfolding in front of us.
Feeling anxious, afraid, angry, heartbroken, worried, depressed or full of sorrow about what’s happening in the world are all normal, proportionate responses to this moment.
We cannot be expected to thrive when there are paramilitary forces patrolling our streets around the world - including in the US, in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, in Iran - and killing people without consequence.
When our so-called world leaders are redefining ‘peace’ as colonial occupation and ‘leadership’ as bullying and blackmail.
When we’re in year seven of a pandemic that has been recognised as a mass disabling event, yet the policy has been to let it spread feely for years to cause more long-term sickness, disablement and death.
When immigrants and trans people the world over are scapegoated for the failures of trickle-down economics and the false promise of infinite growth.
For so many people, particularly those less protected and on the margins of society, everyday existence has become squarely about survival. That in itself can be all-consuming.
And it isn’t sustainable in the long term. Humans need more than their basic needs being met for survival. They need connection, self-expression, meaning, joy, discovery, beauty, identity, self-expression, spirituality.
I imagine ‘thriving’ contains all of those things. But rather than viewing it as a binary between either surviving or thriving, I’ve been thinking about what lives in the space between those states.
I think one of the things that exists on the continuum from surviving to thriving is creating. We feel something, we imagine something, we make something. It’s an expression of being alive.
Photo of a black fire hydrant hand-painted with white stripes, flowers and a face, placed against a white wall surrounded by grey rocks, brown grass and a green bush of sage.
In reflecting on William Blake’s invention of ‘Illuminated Printing’ in 1788, which enabled him to DIY-print his picture books including image and text all in one go, Maria Popova makes this point beautifully:
“[Blake] knew what we all eventually realize, if we are awake and courageous enough: that the best way — and the only effective way — to complain about the way things are is to make new and better things, untested and unexampled things, things that spring from the gravity of creative conviction and drag the status quo like a tide toward some new horizon.”
We create in so many different ways, which doesn’t have to be ‘art’ in the traditional sense. It could be:
Cooking a meal
Making a paper plane
Painting a fire hydrant (like someone did in the picture below)
Putting on a flash mob
Setting up a food bank
Creating a whole philosophy
Writing this blog post
Any form of creative expression is a sign of life. And connecting to our creativity can remind us that there is still something alive inside of us, even as we’re pushed to become ‘reverse centaurs’.
As I’ve been reflecting on this, I realised how much this has to do with an expanded definition of resilience that understands it as the collective capacity to change the conditions that create our suffering in the first place.
By creating, we change the course of what happens next, however small. And that is so much more than mere survival.
So, whatever and however you are creating, know that it matters intrinsically, even when nobody else sees it.