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I recently completed week four of The Artist’s Way program. I have done the program before, but I had skipped over the challenge this week asks us to do.
Reading deprivation! The idea of not reading is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many of us – especially once you realise it is not just the act of sitting with a book you are foregoing. All external input is put in the reading deprivation basket. Social media, podcasts, TV, YouTube, emails, the radio, whatever your audio-visual distraction technique is, outside of what you absolutely must do to keep your job or your business viable, it is given up for this week. As someone who lives alone and works from home, I don’t mind admitting I was a little intimidated by what I had committed to doing.
Why would anyone want to undertake a week of reading deprivation? In The Artist’s Way book, Julia Cameron reminds us that without distractions we are once again thrust into the sensory world. Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a silence we often fill with chatty companions. We cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our creative inspiration, above the static. We are disconnected from what we believe and what we value in the busyness that comes with noise.
What did I learn in my week of reading deprivation? That the world will not stop turning if I am out of the loop with world news and social feeds. The friends who really care will pick up the phone this week for a real conversation in an expression of support for what I am experimenting with. I was reminded that I have an almost endless fascination with finding shapes and stories in the clouds – lucky for me, my bed is perfectly placed to take advantage of this fascination each morning. With no socials to get to or busyness to engage with, mornings stretched luxuriously and slow before me. I revisited old recipes and dusted off long unused can tins and enjoyed the simple pleasure of waiting for a cake to cool enough to slice into it. Longer afternoons and evenings gave ample opportunity to walk and amble and soak up parts of my neighborhood left unexplored for too long – no cake guilt, phew.
With the usual headphone distractions off limits, I was left alone to enjoy my surroundings in intimate details. Parent birds popping in and out of tree hollows. The scent of roses and wisteria and jasmine heating in the spring sunshine causing me to slow for moments and drink in the warm and heavy air. The way the steam from a cup of tea washes over your face as you lift it to drink.
Julia speaks of attention as a way to connect and survive. Indeed, a creative life requires great swathes of attention. To the profound and the mundane. The devil, as they say, is in the details. Very often it takes pain to force us to pay attention, and the reward for attention is always healing. I am pretty sure that is one of my favorite lines in the whole book. By removing the constant chatter of modern life, we are giving ourselves the gift of attention and consequently the gift of healing.
Is it a tough week? At times, absolutely. A bit of forward planning will help take the sting out of some of your deprivation. Invite a friend around for dinner that you haven't seen for ages. Take that dance class you have been promising yourself. Sit in your garden and listen to your neighborhood. The list of possibilities is endless. There will be some pain, there will be some grief. And there will be time to sit with those things in partnership rather than rejection and the healing will come.
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