He had done his art for over 35 years. Every morning he woke up and went to his studio. These days he was older so he limped more than walked there.

He looked at his subject—some peaches on a table or apples or grapes. These simple beauties still dazzled him. Then he breathed, picked up his palette. And he painted.

Just a small-town artist doing what he loved.

Over the years he occasionally would give one of his paintings to a neighbor or friend, always to the open-mouthed delight of the recipient. Or maybe when family was over, he would bring out a piece or two to share.

Eventually an art dealer in Paris heard about the artist’s work and convinced him to let the public have a look. The dealer put together an exhibition, and art collectors were astounded. For the first time the world stood before the work of Paul Cezanne, whom many today consider the father of modern art.

Cezanne himself was taken aback. Making his way into the gallery that revelatory day, Cezanne staggered a bit. He leaned on his son’s shoulder and said, “Look, they have framed them.”

Our First Love

We get into this because we love it. Our creative work feeds our souls, and every now and then we feel like we’re helping to feed someone else’s soul too.

We write for hours and hours and don’t want to stop. We get wrapped up in it, and when we’re away from it, we pine to get back.

Courtesy of Unsplash

We, like Cezanne, don’t think about anything else. It’s just us and our art, and the rest falls away.

And then something happens. Or often it does anyway.

Maybe the reason Cezanne could maintain his purity of perspective was because he lived before the Internet. Regardless, something changes for us. We start worrying about traffic and comment count and subscribers and platform. We’re told we have to worry about these things if we want publishers to take us seriously.

And we can begin to lose our first love. It can be crowded out amid a mass of nagging concerns. “Will anyone read this? What will they think of it? Is this my breakthrough?”

It becomes harder to get lost in our work.

A Holy Naiveté

A certain naiveté is essential to every artist, regardless of your medium, be it words or acrylics or tempos or even interviews and board meetings. (In my mind you’re an artist if you use your mind to solve problems. Writers do that. So do musicians and managers.)

Courtesy of Unsplash

The kind of naiveté I think we all need is the kind Cezanne had. We need in some way to become like children again. I see it in my own kids. When they’re out riding their bikes or swinging in a tree or building Legos or imagining a parallel universe with their stuffed animals, they’re completely immersed. It’s just them and their art. Their naiveté about other cares of the world is precious, holy even.

And my guess is that’s why you’re in this. You’ve experienced those moments when time stood still and everything vanished around you. You’ve had moments when you got lost in your art.

But maybe you’re struggling. Maybe now you’re wrought with so many other anxieties, it’s hard to see anything else. Maybe sometimes it’s hard to remember what it felt like to love this. Has it started to feel like more of a grind than anything else?

If so, I want to offer some ideas for getting back to that sense of wonder and passion and love for this gift we’ve all been given.

1. Do the art thing first. Before you get on social media or text or take a phone call or look at your stats, do your writing. Let creativity be one of if not the first thing you engage in each day. At times I think creativity is the only truly human endeavor. It’s certainly more humanizing than doing email!
2. Block it out. Make time for this. Decide when you’re going to write and schedule it. And remember to linger sometimes. An author I’ve worked with, Alan Hirsch, has referred to “loving on” his writing. I like that. Sometimes our words need us to linger over them a bit, particularly when the first draft is done. Don’t overdo this. More prose has been murdered than nurtured by an excess of attention. Try to find the right balance.
3. Create sacred space. Your work is nothing if not sacred. Do what you can to facilitate an environment that honors the holiness of your work. For some (me sometimes) this can be as simple as an awesome cup of coffee in a café with some ambient tunes. For others it might be dim light and a candle burning. If you haven’t already downloaded my worksheet that helps you develop your process, click here.

Sometimes just a small change in your routine can make a huge difference. Respect your art. It’s important, so give it its due. Set up your life in a way that honors this endeavor. If you do, odds are good you’ll find yourself back in the flow. Just you and your art.

Question: What’s one thing you can do in the coming days to help you recapture your first love? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

Editorial Note: I first heard the story about Cezanne in The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham (Bantam, 1993). My version above takes some imaginative liberties, but the main events of the narrative cohere to what I read in Kurtz and Ketcham.