My September reading entry is Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It leaves me with a question worth considering slowly: when we want to create something, what way of living makes room for that creation to happen?
Reading Notes: Creativity and How We Live
Rubin places creativity within the wider experience of living. An artist’s work is connected to their relationship with the world, and creativity can have a place in everyone’s life. He is interested in making space for creators to move beyond their own expectations and reconnect with openness. These are central directions of the book, rather than a production formula that guarantees success.
What follows is my own reflection on these ideas in relation to life, photography, and freediving. The diving connections are an extension of the reading, rather than arguments made in the book.
Before Rushing to Express, Look at the World
I think of the moment I pick up a camera. Wanting to take a good photograph and being willing to see what is happening before me are two forms of attention that can overlap without being quite the same.
The first can give the image a task in advance: it should be distinctive, it should have a particular style, it should prove that the trip was worthwhile. The second allows things to remain themselves for a while. Light falls on a wall. Someone pauses at a street corner. The wind changes the direction of leaves. These things do not have to become a work immediately. They can first become an encounter with what is there.
My interpretation is that creating requires time for observation. This applies to photography and to writing. Some feelings have not yet found their language. If I hurry to give them a conclusion, the words may reach an ending before the experience does.
Give Unformed Ideas Some Patience
I often feel that life asks us to explain quickly what we are doing. An idea has barely appeared before it seems to need an account of its value, its purpose, and its outcome.
Something still taking shape cannot easily answer those questions. A fragment may remain a fragment for now. An attempt may only tell me that this particular path has not yet led anywhere.
One working attitude I want to take from this reading is to give exploration and judgment different moments. At the beginning, I can collect, experiment, and change direction. When shaping the work, I can make choices that give it a clearer form.
Patience also needs action to support it. Write a paragraph. Make a small experiment. Keep a version that can be revisited. Even when the result disappoints, there is something concrete through which to see what I have learned.
Freediving: Making Space for the Present
Bringing these reflections into freediving, I think about the distance between a plan and the present moment.
Plans are useful. They give preparation, training, and communication a direction. But if my mind holds only the performance I expect, I may miss what needs attention now: my actual condition, changes in the environment, and communication with my buddy.
I understand openness in creating as a willingness to receive information. That attitude has meaning in the water too. A single dive does not have to carry the entire task of proving myself. I can prepare seriously, and I can adjust the plan when conditions are unsuitable.
This is a reflection on mindset prompted by the reading, rather than diving instruction. Subjective calm cannot replace safety judgment. Freediving and breath-hold practice in water require the supervision of a qualified buddy or instructor.
Finish a Work, Leave Room to Begin Again
The Chinese title, which links creativity with being, makes me pause and ask whether I have allowed myself to express something from the experience I have now.
I do not need to resolve every question before writing an article. Expression can happen while understanding is still developing. A reading note can honestly record what I see today, while remaining open to additions and revisions in the future.
Choices in life may also reveal their meaning only after we act. I can begin with something concrete, observe how it changes me, and then decide on the next step.
This reading leaves me wanting to rearrange my attention: look more, listen more, give unfinished things some time. At the same time, take care to finish what is in my hands, allowing it to leave me and enter a connection with others.
I want to understand creating as an ongoing practice: life offers experience, I make choices within it, and I turn those choices into forms that can be shared. After a work is finished, the world is still worth looking at again.