Timing isn’t everything, it’s the only thing

The great creative discipline is simply knowing what season it is.

Which means much more than the changing of the leaves or the melting of the snow or setting your clocks back an hour.

The word season actually comes from saison, which means, the right moment, the appropriate time. Our job as communicators, then, people whose work involves creating something and then turning it loose in the world, is to develop an exquisite understanding of our own timing.

Let’s use breathing as an example.

From a respiratory perspective, there are three possible actions: Inhaling, pausing and exhaling.

Physiologically, each of these actions only lasts a few seconds. Unless you’re a sea turtle who can hold his breath for seven hours. But psychologically and emotionally and existentially, each of these actions can last anywhere from an hour to a week to a month to a year.

It all depends on what season it is in our creative life.

Einstein once said that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. That’s why I started believe in seasons. Not supernatural prophetic agencies like fate, serendipity, synchronicity, luck, the law of attraction and god’s will.

Nature’s agenda. The geometric order and rhythm of life. You know, something I could actually prove.

The more I ran my experiences through that logical filter, the more patterns started to emerge. Turns out, you can actually design systems and structures to align yourself with nature’s timing. And since there’s not much we can do to control that, the best we can hope for is to hone that discipline and to creatively leverage the right moment and the appropriate time.

Figure out what season it is.

Inhaling is the creative season of inspiration, or input, meaning listening for what wants to be written.

Pausing is creative season of organization, or throughput, meaning managing your ideas as an inventory system.

Exhaling is the creative season of production, or output, meaning shipping work out of the factory.

Which one are you doing?