The One Thing You Should Never Do When You’ve Lost Your Way with a Creative Project
It’s tempting to panic and rush to a solution, but that’s a huge mistake
Makawao Forest Reserve on Maui, Hawaii is 2,093 acres of tightly packed tropical ash trees, cook pines, and giant ferns. An aerial view of the reserve shows a sea of uninterrupted greenery so thick and thorny you need a machete to hack through it.
Back in May of 2019, a young woman named Amanda Eller was hopelessly lost in that sea of foliage. She’d been missing for over two weeks, living on guava, berries and stream water.
The woods swarmed with hunters, rock climbers and rappellers and the skies buzzed with drone operators and helicopter, but no one could find her.
On the seventeenth day of her disappearance, searchers in a helicopter finally spotted Amanda. She’d lost 15 pounds, was sunburned, bruised and had a broken leg, but she was alert and very much alive.
I’ve read many accounts of Amanda’s miraculous ordeal and rescue, and find it to be an apt metaphor for an artist facing a truly difficult creative problem.
When Amanda set out for her hike, she was not at all prepared. She left her cell phone and water in her car. Initially, she went off in a completely wrong direction, unknowingly hiking for hours and hours away from where she started.
Throughout her ordeal, her focus was on choosing to live; it was a mantra, playing over and over in the yoga teacher’s head. “Choose life, choose life.”
Then, when hope was waning, she surrendered and asked for outside help.
Recalling that moment, Amanda says, “I am looking at the sky and saying, ‘mercy…just please pick me up. I am ready, I have learned…I know this is an essential part of my story, of being here on earth. But I am ready, I call mercy.’”
Obviously, writing a novel or painting a watercolor is not nearly as harrowing as what Amanda endured, and yet many of the emotions and aspects of the journey are similar.
Several years ago, I started keeping a creative project diary, and looking over those diaries, I see certain elements, over and over.
Not being prepared is a huge issue. “I haven’t done the research,” I’ve said when a project nags at me begging to be birthed, and yet I plunged in anyway.
And getting lost? Another persistent theme.
I looked at my notebook and found many instances in my journey when I’m far from my final destination, and yet I kept my focus on getting to the end, even while other shiny, new projects beckoned.
There are also dozens of times when I wrote, “I got nothing. I feel like giving up. Help me out.”
In other words, send in the helicopter, and inevitably, the helicopter always arrives.
By the way, should you ever get lost in the woods, the advice from experts is always the same:
Stay in one place until help comes. Similarly, when we lose our way with a creative project, we often get panicked or scared.
Sometimes we try to frantically fix things, often making things worse, instead of waiting for the right answer to come.
That’s a mistake. The right answer almost comes when we are calm, collected and attentive.
