When Creativity is the Best Response to an Overwhelming World

When life feels out of whack, the thing you 'have no time for' is the thing you need most.

Cherry blossom season must be a reward for March’s feverish pace.

Even if I still think in Fahrenheit, life in Tokyo has reworked my thinking about a lot of things that used to be a given.

For example, lately I’ve been thinking about how the old English proverb about the weather this month – “March comes in like a lion, and out like a lamb” – doesn’t really match my experience of the season anymore.

When I lived in New York City, I always thought of this saying when the deep-freeze of February mellowed into the balmier days of late March, those days when bodegas started stocking their bins with fresh tulips and layers of sidewalk ice started to thaw . . . revealing dog poo and the occasional dead rat that had frozen months before. Ha!

Back then, March meant spring break and Easter candy. Nowadays, it means work deadlines, tax season, seasonal allergies, and more rainy weather. The clear blue skies of plum season dissolve into blurry gray days where cherry blossoms bring consolation. If you’re lucky, you’ll get sun on a Saturday for a hanami picnic.

I started working on this newsletter a couple of weeks ago, leading up to the spring equinox. But I couldn’t find time to finish, and I started over. Same thing happened. And again. I longed for a stretch of time to just let the thoughts roll, uninterrupted. Every day, too many things competed for my attention.

And now, dammit, it’s the last day of March and I’m starting yet again because life has already shifted so much in a few weeks, and this writing simply wants to be written.

It says something about the state of my life when a time of year that’s supposed to be about “balance”– daylight and darkness in equal amounts – has felt nothing like equilibrium.

But it’s a good goal. When life feels out of whack, the thing you ‘have no time for’ is the thing you need most. Why? Because creativity is an antidote. It’s resistance. It’s rebellion against the things that might bring us down and hold us back.

Have you ever felt helpless after a doomscrolling bender or simply getting overwhelmed by world news? I think my desire to do something and take back my power is exactly what’s been fueling my repeated attempts to write. If I want to see positivity in the world, if I want to see more beauty and poetry and thoughtful interactions, what am I contributing to that? When the world seems to be burning, I’m compelled to improvise my own little rain dance. Or maybe it’s a lion dance. Sometimes I want to roar.

Dear reader, I’m sure you have your own version of this – maybe a project or a song or a gathering – so I’m asking you to contribute, too. We need you. What is the rain dance you’ve been putting off?