Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
🌳 Pulling up roots.
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I'm writing this under an enormous redwood tree in Northern California, a thousand miles from home. I’m in a friend’s backyard, having just slept in the top bunk of a tiny cabin. I had almond milk in my coffee and cottage cheese in my pancakes. Being a guest in someone else's home means making a hundred small adjustments—from the density of the pillows to the taste of the water. It reminds me how much of a creature of habit I’ve become. This is my first proper vacation in five years. A couple of weeks on the road. Work projects on hold. My studio, dark. Each day, full of slightly discombobulating experiences. Yesterday I waded into the Russian River with my dog, Clover. She watched, confused, as I skipped a rock across the surface. My dogs aren’t fond of change either. They expect breakfast at 5 a.m. and dinner at 4. Any deviation is an outrage. They don’t understand bunk beds. I used to travel constantly. Business meetings on five continents. A 40-hour round trip to Tokyo. Half of Europe crossed off the bucket list. But I’ve lost my taste for carry-on bags and room service; my dreams of Kenya, Buenos Aires, and Tahiti have faded. That’s OK with me. I’ll read about them in books. I think it’s the residue of my childhood. Growing up with divorces and too many new schools made me crave stability and comfort. And yet I’ve also longed for adventure. That tension has shaped a lot of my life. Then our last vacation dislodged everything. Stranded by the pandemic, we wound up selling our New York apartment and repotting ourselves in Phoenix. I burrowed in. It seemed that cured me of the travel bug for good. ​ Still, my timidity and resistance to newness bother me. I want change to be part of my life. I need to stay comfortable with the uncomfortable. I tell myself that often. My routine compresses time. I sit down to write in my diary at night—another habit—and can’t remember what happened this morning, or if it happened yesterday, or maybe the day before that. It all smears together. Entering my dotage, it’s easier than ever to cling to the familiar. To eat early dinners by the TV. To show up at the mall cinema each Tuesday for the senior discount, watching reruns of films I first saw in the '80s. To turn dinner parties into rehashes of pickleball and politics, knees and Netflix. No wonder we fall asleep early. ​ And now I’m here, on the road again. Doing small, unfamiliar things. Renting cars. Borrowing shampoo. Skipping rocks. Emerging, blinking into unfamiliar sunlight, ready to sample new food, new behavior, new ideas—roughening up the well-worn routines. We’ve planned three or four more trips this year. I hope they’ll push me further out and let change in. ​ The tree I’m sitting under hasn’t budged in two centuries. It appears unshakable. But my friend tells me that last month, their neighbor’s redwood unexpectedly toppled and crushed their shed. I look up, uneasy. Your pal, Danny |
Danny Gregory: I help you make art again
Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
Why am I writing this essay? Because it’s almost Friday, and I always send out an essay each Friday. Because I’m a writer, and writers write. Because (most of the time) I love doing this—arranging ideas, picking words. Because I want to see the finished piece. And feel that sense of satisfaction. Because I do this for you. But more, I do this for me. But does it matter why I do this? Absolutely. Because if I mistake my motivations and I’m fuzzy on my goals, I could end up looking for answers...
When I was 27, I almost learned to play the piano. I’d gone to a dinner party, and the host—a film editor, not a musician—sat down at an old upright and played something slow and emotional. It wasn’t flashy. He used both hands, sure, but he wasn’t showing off. It sounded like he was speaking with the keys. I remember thinking: I want to do that. The next morning, I looked up local music teachers in the Yellow Pages. Then I paused. It would take years to get good. I imagined scales, clunky...
For the last quarter century of his life, my grandfather spent hours each day at his word processor, writing recollections, essays, and articles. He had been a doctor, but like many aging artists and writers, he turned to the page to make sense of the life he had lived. Every decade, he wrote a new version of his autobiography—hundreds of pages of translucent, onion-skinned remembrance. Some he mailed to me or my mother, but most sat in desk drawers or binders, unread, unappreciated. When he...