Week 5. Day 5. Letter from the Future

Creativity is about making something from nothing. It’s amazing. Where once there was a blank screen, an empty canvas, a dry block of land, now there is a book, a painting, a house. Unsurprising, then, that this extraordinary act sometimes requires atomic force.

It amazes me, daily, this human ability to simply imagine things. To make stuff up.

It’s an ability that we use in the writing of words, yes, and the making of art – but we also use it, daily, in the making of ourselves and of our stories.

Yesterday I asked you to spend some time looking at the beautiful words you have created over the last few weeks, and to consider what qualities you admire about your own writing.

Today, I want to take that a little further, and invite you to imagine yourself into your writing future.

Take some time to get yourself into a meditative and hopeful state. Consider the kind of creator you want to be, and what you want your creative practice to look like.

Choose a date in the future – think 5-to-10 years from now. Imagine that you have travelled in time to this date and you are sitting down writing a letter (yes, it can be a long chatty email) to your writing buddy telling them how great your creative life is now.

When you write this letter, rather than focusing on the negative – the things that you want to be rid of – write about what you would like to have happening – focus on the solution, not the mere absence of the problem. Try to step into the skin of this future self.

What is your creative practice like now? What qualities have you developed in your creative work? What have you strengthened and celebrated? What are the outcomes? How are you supporting your creative endeavours – and how are they supporting you?

When you’ve written the letter, try to sit with it for a moment, creating that future memory. I hope that ‘future you’ will thank you for it.