We underestimate how much creativity depends on tolerating not-knowing.
One of the more radical ideas in creativity research comes from the psychoanalytic tradition, particularly from Wilfred Bion’s notion of “negative capability” (itself borrowed from John Keats). The capacity, as Keats originally put it, to remain with uncertainty without ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ In practice, it means resisting the urge to immediately resolve uncertainty. To not rush to closure. To sit, for a moment longer than feels comfortable, in the space where meaning hasn’t yet crystallised.
We can see similar ideas elsewhere. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on ‘flow’, there is an emphasis on the balance between challenge and skill, but what is often overlooked is that entry into flow frequently involves a period of disorientation. Or take Donald Winnicott’s idea of the “transitional space”—that intermediate area of experience between inner and outer reality, where play and creativity happen. It is, by definition, not fully known. Not fully controlled. It requires a kind of psychological looseness that can feel, at times, like a loss of footing.
Even outside explicitly psychological frameworks, writers have long circled this point. Joan Didion’s famous line—“I don’t know what I think until I write it down”—is often quoted as a neat aphorism, but it carries a deeper implication: that writing is not the expression of prior clarity, but the means by which clarity is tentatively, sometimes reluctantly, arrived at.
One of the reasons I care so much about structured creative spaces—whether that’s the weekly Creative Flow coworking session, the ongoing Writers Flow Circle, 1:1 coaching, or workshops—is that they provide a container for this kind of work. A place where not-knowing is not only tolerated but expected. Where you don’t have to perform certainty in order to belong.
If you’re in a season where your work feels slightly out of reach—where you can sense something wanting to emerge but can’t yet articulate it—you don’t necessarily need a new strategy. You might need a different relationship to that feeling: a willingness to stay with the question a little longer than is comfortable.
If that resonates, I’m running an upcoming workshop that may be of interest:
We’ll be working directly with attention, distraction, and the subtle dynamics that either support or disrupt creative flow, very much including this question of how we meet the unknown.
There is something uncomfortably revealing about the creative projects we keep putting off “for later.” The ones we abandon outright are easier to narrate, to explain away, to file under “not quite right” or “no longer aligned.” But the projects we hold on to with a kind of reverence but never actually commit to have a lot to say about what we truly value.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently, not least because I’ve found myself in the thick of planning and filming new material for The Art of Creative Practice, which, this autumn, will expand into a new interactive community with a dedicated app. It’s a project that, in one sense, has been years in the making through the accumulation of methods, fragments of teaching, and lived experiments in what it might mean to treat creativity as a way of approaching the world. In another sense, it has only just begun, precisely because I’ve stopped waiting for it to become something more perfect, more complete, more defensible.
I’m reminded here of something in Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: the idea that most artists are defeated not by a lack of talent, but by the fear of making something imperfect. The projects we keep “for later” are often the ones we’ve invested with the highest symbolic stakes. They are not just projects: they are proxies for who we think we might be, if only we could get them right.
And so we wait…
But waiting, as it turns out, isn’t a neutral act. It shapes the project just as much as doing does. It introduces a kind of conceptual inflation: the longer something is delayed, the more significant it seems to become, and the more it has to carry. No wonder it becomes increasingly difficult to begin.
There’s a tension here that I see often in my coaching work, and that I recognise in myself: the pull between the desire for integrity and the reality of practice. Integrity asks for coherence, for alignment, for something that feels “true.” Practice, on the other hand, is messy, iterative, frequently disappointing. The danger is that we place integrity at the end of the process—something to be achieved once the work is finished—rather than at the beginning, as a commitment to showing up honestly, even (especially) when the work is unfinished.
This is where the projects we defer become instructive. They show us, quite precisely, where our thresholds are. What feels too important to risk? What feels too revealing to share? What feels too central to our identity to be allowed to fail?
In my own case, fully developing an app-based community for The Art of Creative Practice has long occupied that space. It sits at the intersection of so many things I care about: creativity as a spiritual practice, the relationship between inner life and outer action, and increasingly, the connection between creativity and ecology, that is, what it might mean to create in a way that is responsive to, and in relationship with, the more-than-human world.
Over the past months, as I’ve been filming and shaping this new material, I’ve had to let go of a certain fantasy of what the project should be. This feels important to say, because it’s easy to assume that projects like this emerge fully formed, or that there is a moment of clarity in which everything clicks into place. In reality, it’s much closer to what Donald Schön called “reflection-in-action”—a kind of thinking that happens through doing, where the work itself becomes the site of inquiry.
There’s also something relational at play here. One of the reasons I’m building this next phase of The Art of Creative Practice as a dedicated app and year-long journey is precisely to create a more vibrant, dialogical space for this kind of unfolding. The older model—content delivered, consumed, and completed—feels increasingly insufficient for the kind of work I’m interested in. Creativity, especially when understood as a spiritual or ecological practice, is not something we do alone. It is shaped through conversation, through encounter, through the subtle feedback loops of community.
More on this in the coming weeks and months, but for now it feels like a significant shift: from holding the project back until it is “ready,” to allowing it to develop in public, in relation.
If there is a question running through all of this, it might be this: what would it mean to bring one of your “for later” projects slightly closer? Not to complete it, not to perfect it, but simply to reduce the distance between where it is and where you are.
And if perfectionism feels like a particularly strong thread in all of this, I’m running a workshop next week that speaks directly to it:
We’ll be working with some of these dynamics in a practical, grounded way, looking at how the inner critic operates, and how we might begin to relate to it differently, without needing to silence it entirely.
For now, though, I’m returning to the question I began with. The projects we keep “for later” are not just deferred tasks. They are, in many cases, small maps of our inner landscape. They show us where we hesitate, where we hope, where we protect something that feels, inarticulately, important.
The invitation is not to force those projects into the present, but to become curious about the distance we’ve placed between ourselves and them. To ask, gently but persistently: what am I waiting for?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to really read something.
Partly this has come from my work running the new Writer’s Flow Circle, which has already been a genuinely energising experience sitting alongside a group of thoughtful, committed writers who are all, in different ways, trying to deepen their relationship to their own work. What’s become clear, very quickly, is that writing problems are almost always reading problems in disguise.
When one of my 1-1 coaching clients says “I feel stuck,” or “I don’t know what I think,” or “I’ve lost confidence in my voice,” what often sits underneath is a fractured reading life: too many inputs, too quickly consumed, with too little time for digestion.
There’s a familiar temptation to read instrumentally, to gather, to assemble, to skim. At times useful, yes. But it can also be subtly corrosive if it becomes the default mode. We live in a culture that rewards speed and visibility. To have read something is often more about being able to reference it than to have truly encountered it.
The philosopher Maryanne Wolf writes about this in Reader, Come Home, where she describes the shift from “deep reading” to what she calls “bi-literate reading”, a split between fast, digital skimming and slower, immersive engagement. The more we train ourselves to skim, the harder it becomes to sustain attention.
This isn’t new, of course. It sits somewhere in the lineage of thinkers like Mortimer Adler in How to Read a Book, and further back in the monastic tradition of lectio divina, the slow, attentive, almost meditative reading of sacred texts
Here are a few practices that are deeply effective:
1. Time-boxed immersion Rather than vaguely intending to “read more,” set a defined container. Even 25 minutes of uninterrupted reading can be enough to drop beneath the surface.
2. Read before you input This is a small but hugely significant shift: reading before opening email or social media. The quality of attention is noticeably different.
3. Pair reading with reflection Not extensive note-taking. Just a few lines afterwards: What stayed with me? What resisted me? What do I want to return to?
4. Re-read without guilt Depth often comes from returning, not progressing. There’s something very rich and important and valuable in allowing a text to unfold over time.
The more I work with writers, the more I see that reading and writing are not separate activities. They’re two expressions of the same underlying process. When reading becomes shallow, writing often becomes strained; when reading deepens, writing tends to follow, not immediately, but reliably.
If you’ve felt scattered in your reading lately—or if books have started to feel more like obligations than encounters—it might be worth experimenting with a slightly different approach this week. Choose one text. Give it more time than feels necessary. Let it be incomplete. And notice what happens.
If You’d Like to Go Further
If this resonates, there are a few ways to continue the work together.
I’m currently offering free Clarity Calls for those interested in ongoing 1–1 creativity coaching. These are relaxed, exploratory conversations where we look at your current creative process—what’s working, what isn’t, and where you might want to go next.
I’m also running a couple of upcoming sessions that build on these themes:
Weekly Creative Flow Coworking Session: Decluttering Your Creative Mind Monday 27 April | 10.00–12.00 (UK time) | Free A gentle, structured space to clear mental noise and reconnect with focused creative work. Register: https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313785594/
And, if you’re in London, I’ll be hosting a series of in-person workshops at Treadwell’s Books over the coming months. Keep an eye out for more details!
Creative practice is one of the few places where procrastination can masquerade as discernment.
In most areas of life the difference between the two is fairly easy to spot. If you delay replying to an email for three weeks, you are probably not engaging in a subtle process of ethical reflection. If you keep postponing a dentist appointment, you are unlikely to be waiting for the right aesthetic conditions to emerge. Procrastination, in most domains, looks exactly like what it is.
Creative work is different. Here, hesitation can feel virtuous. Delay can wear the coat of taste. Not doing something can look like a form of artistic integrity. The line between genuine discernment and sophisticated avoidance becomes very thin.
This is one of the reasons creative practice can become psychologically complex. It sits at the intersection of imagination, identity, and judgment. We are not just deciding what to do—we are deciding whether what we do will be worthy of the version of ourselves we hope to become.
The philosopher and theologian Josef Pieper once wrote that leisure is the basis of culture. What he meant wasn’t idleness in the modern sense, but a kind of receptive attentiveness to reality. Creative work often begins in this receptive space. We listen before we speak. We wait before we write.
But the receptive state can also become a hiding place.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently while preparing a few things for the coming week. Ostara is approaching, thel seasonal threshold into Spring hat invites a little reflection and reorganisation. My houseplants are beginning to look as if they want to wake up again. A few of them clearly need repotting and I have been making notes about some spring recipes I want to experiment with.
These kinds of seasonal rhythms often nudge my creative life back into motion. Gardening and writing share a certain temperament. Neither responds well to frantic effort, but both require regular engagement. You cannot simply contemplate tomatoes into existence. At some point, you have to put your hands in the soil.
Writing is similar. The American writer Annie Dillard once observed that ‘how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ In creative work, however, the daily decision is often framed differently. The question becomes: is this the right moment to act, or should I wait for greater clarity?
Sometimes the answer genuinely is to wait.
Discernment is real. Ideas need time to ripen. A paragraph written too early can flatten something that needed to remain fluid for a while. Anyone who has done serious creative work knows that forcing an idea before it is ready often produces something strangely lifeless.
But procrastination has learned the language of discernment remarkably well. It says things like: this project deserves better conditions. Or: I should do more research first. Or: I just need a slightly clearer structure before I begin.
These can all be reasonable thoughts. They can also be remarkably effective forms of delay. The sociologist Robert Merton once wrote about what he called “trained incapacity”, the strange phenomenon where the very skills we develop become obstacles in new contexts. I sometimes think something similar happens to experienced creative practitioners. As our taste improves, so does our capacity for hesitation. We become more aware of the gap between what we imagine and what we can currently produce.
The result can be a kind of elegant paralysis. This is one of the reasons community can be so helpful in creative work. When we work entirely alone, discernment and procrastination can blur together indefinitely. When we show up in a room with others—especially others who are also doing the work—things tend to become clearer.
This is something I see regularly in the coworking and coaching sessions I run. Someone arrives saying they have been “thinking about” a project for weeks. Then we spend twenty-five minutes writing together, and suddenly several pages exist.
It turns out the idea was ready all along.
The ancient bards had a word for the mysterious source of creative inspiration: Awen. But they also understood that inspiration rarely arrives in a vacuum. It tends to visit people who are already working.
This is why I have been putting so much energy recently into building spaces where that working energy can gather.
If you are curious about how this kind of creative structure works in practice, I am hosting a free session this week where you can experience it directly:
The session is designed as a gentle introduction to the rhythm of the circle: a short teaching, a guided creative exercise, and some focused writing time together. Many people find that even one hour like this can unlock a surprising amount of momentum.
And for those who want a deeper container for their work, the full programme begins the following week:
Over twelve weeks we work with the deeper structures of creative practice: inspiration, discipline, craft, and community. It is part workshop, part coaching space, and part creative fellowship.
Alongside this group work, I also offer 1-1 creative coaching for writers and thinkers who want more personalised support. These sessions can be particularly helpful if you feel stuck in that grey zone between discernment and delay. Sometimes a single conversation can clarify what the next step actually is.
In the meantime, the small seasonal rituals continue. I will probably spend some time this week repotting a few herbs and planning those spring recipes. The shift from winter to early spring always feels like a useful reminder that creative work rarely moves in straight lines.
There are seasons of incubation. Seasons of emergence. Seasons of pruning.
But the key thing—the thing that separates discernment from procrastination—is that the work eventually returns to the page.
The soil is turned. The seed is planted. And something begins
As I prepare for some very exciting spring workshops and begin working with a new cohort of 1–1 clients, I find myself returning again and again to the question: what kind of attention are we cultivating? And to what ends?
At the same time, I am collaborating with colleagues at the University of Surrey on a research study exploring the relationship between mindfulness and originality. I have designed an 8-week Mindfulness for Originality programme that we are currently trialing, and we will be studying its outcomes over the coming months. The premise is simple but, I think, quietly radical: that sustained, non-reactive attention is not the enemy of creativity but its precondition.
This runs counter to a certain romantic myth of originality as frenzy. But when we examine the intellectual lives of figures like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, or Virginia Woolf, what we find is not scattered brilliance but disciplined depth. Woolf’s diaries are full of labour—patient, iterative, attentive labour. Originality emerges not from distraction but from fidelity.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have moved from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, in which the violence is internalised. We exhaust ourselves trying to be endlessly responsive. The result is not freedom but fragmentation. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari traces how economic and technological systems have steadily eroded our capacity for sustained attention, not as an accident but as a business model.
The ethics of attention, then, must reckon with power.
Who profits when we are distracted? Who benefits when we can’t read a long book, hold a complex argument, or sit with a difficult feeling?
Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows made this argument over a decade ago, but the evidence has only intensified. We are training our brains toward interruption. And yet, paradoxically, we long for immersion.
I see this longing in my coaching practice. People do not come to me because they lack ideas. They come because they cannot hold their ideas long enough to deepen them. They skim their own lives.
Reading, in this context, becomes a form of resistance.
To read a demanding text—say, a passage from To the Lighthouse or a dense philosophical argument—is to enact a countercultural choice. It says: I will not be hurried. I will not reduce this to a headline. I will allow complexity to exceed me.
But attention is not only about texts. It is about how we inhabit our own projects.
In the 8-week programme we are trialling at Surrey, one of the early exercises invites participants to notice the precise moment at which they reach for distraction during creative work. Not to judge it. Not to suppress it. Simply to witness it. The findings, even anecdotally, are striking. Original insights tend to arise not in the first burst of enthusiasm but in the stretch just beyond discomfort—when one stays.
There is an ethics here, too. To stay with one’s work is to honour it. To stay with another person is to dignify them. To stay with oneself—especially in the face of uncertainty—is to cultivate integrity.
This is why I am so passionate about the upcoming 5 Days of Creative Abundance workshop (9–13 March, 7.30–8.00 PM GMT, £29).
Yes, it is a practical, energising, five-day immersion into creative flow. Yes, it will give you tools, structure, and momentum. But underneath that, it is an experiment in attention.
For five evenings, we gather. We turn toward what matters. We practise not skimming our own creative impulse.
Abundance, as I understand it, is not accumulation. It is depth. It is the experience of discovering that when you attend properly to one idea, it unfolds. When you give something your full presence, it yields more than you expected.
There is a quiet confidence that arises from this. Not the performative confidence of broadcasting productivity, but the grounded confidence of knowing you can enter and remain in meaningful work.
If you have been feeling scattered, thinly stretched across platforms and obligations, this workshop is designed for you. If you sense that there is more in you—but you can’t quite access it amid the noise—this is for you.
I am intentionally keeping the price accessible (£29) because I want the barrier to entry to be low. But do not mistake accessibility for superficiality. The container will be strong. The invitation will be serious.
And if you are ready for more sustained support, my 1–1 coaching work continues alongside these group offerings. In those spaces, we go deeper. We examine not only habits of attention but the attachment patterns and identity narratives that sustain them. We design structures that protect what is most alive in you. It is precise, relational, and tailored.
Attention, I am increasingly convinced, is a form of stewardship.
In an earlier book project, I explored the ethics of mediation in mail-order occultism—how printed texts promised transformation across distance. I am struck now by how similar the stakes feel. Every medium shapes consciousness. The question is whether we use the medium deliberately or allow it to use us.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message” was not a celebration; it was a warning. If our dominant medium fragments attention, then our inner lives will fragment accordingly—unless we intervene.
This intervention need not be dramatic. It begins with small, repeatable acts. Reading ten pages with full presence. Writing one paragraph without checking a phone. Listening to a friend without composing a response.
It also requires community.
One of the reasons I continue to run workshops—even as I refine my focus and prepare for new directions—is that collective attention is amplifying. When we gather around a shared intention, distraction loses some of its grip.
There is something profoundly moving about watching a group of people choose depth together.
In my own life, this season feels like a threshold. New 1–1 clients. Spring workshops taking shape. Research that, I hope, will contribute something meaningful to the conversation about mindfulness and creativity. It is not frenetic expansion. It is intentional cultivation.
And so I return to the ethical question.
What deserves your attention?
Not what clamours for it. Not what monetises it. What deserves it?
Your most original ideas do not shout. They wait. They require a certain stillness before they reveal themselves.
If you would like to practise that stillness—and discover what abundance might mean in your creative life—I would love for you to join me for the 5 Days of Creative Abundance.
