We spent the day with friends we hadn’t seen in over a year… the kind of people whose presence feels like a deep exhale.
The kids fell into play as if no time had passed.
And for a few hours, the noise of progress quieted down.
Lately, my life has been all forward motion.
All growth, all change, all systems in flight.
Good changes, meaningful ones, but positive doesn’t always mean comfortable.
Somewhere in all that acceleration, I realized I’d lost touch with a quieter part of myself, the one that makes things just for the sake of beauty.
Sitting with our creative friends stirred it again.
I wanted to draw.
To pick up a brush, not to produce, but to remember what it feels like to follow colour for no reason other than that my soul insisted on it.
The silence of wonder
It’s been years since I made art without an outcome in mind.
In that time, I let other voices in: practical ones, efficient ones:
“Why bother with art? AI can do it faster. Better.”
It took me a while to understand what that really meant.
People don’t dismiss art because it’s trivial.
They dismiss it because something inside them went quiet.
Wonder can feel dangerous to those who’ve forgotten their own.
The real loss
The loss isn’t artistic. It’s existential.
When we stop making, we start performing.
We optimize everything, even our joy, until creation itself feels indulgent.
But creativity isn’t decoration. It’s calibration.
It’s how we return to coherence after the world scatters our attention.
The work parallel
In organizations, we talk about innovation, but innovation without play is performance under pressure.
Teams don’t burn out because they’re weak, they burn out because there’s no room for wonder.
The same is true at the personal level.
We can’t design the future if we’ve forgotten how to imagine.
A quiet pledge
So this week, I’m reclaiming that spark.
Not as an artist… as a human.
I want a little more paint on my hands, a little less polish in my plans.
Because those small, purposeless acts of creation are what remind us why we build at all.
If you’ve gone quiet too, I hope you find your spark again… in music, in colour, in laughter, in whatever reminds you that you’re still here, still becoming.
The days are long, but the years are short.
Let’s not let them pass without a little joy on our hands.