Making Spring A Happy, Balanced Season For Creative Work
Spring is when the world wakes up after the hibernation of winter. Our creativity can feel like it’s awakening with the rest of the world, propelling us into a season of new ideas and fresh energy.
This is how creatives described spring in one of four surveys I did in 2019, about doing creative work throughout the seasons. Our energy levels, inspiration and habits are all influenced by the seasons, and they in turn affect us as creatives too.
Understanding these tendencies can help us move forward in our creative lives in a way that is in tune with the seasons. So let’s have a look at what tend to happen in our creative work in spring, and what we can learn from it.
Fresh energy and new ideas
More than anything else, spring is the season when the world wakes up again. After months of darkness and staying inside, the sun comes out and nature starts to sprout with life.
Many feel like spring is when the seasonal year starts. We may set goals in January, but it’s not until spring we get a flow of energy that makes us excited for the year ahead. Spring is the season most people consider a productive one.
Just like flowers are popping out of the earth, ideas start showing up too. If you’ve felt sluggish for a few months, spring might be the season when the fog lifts. Everything feels a little lighter and more possible.
Overwhelm and struggling to choose a focus
The downside to all that fresh energy is that it can quickly become too much. Many report a struggle to choose what to focus on, flitting back and forth between ideas, or simply getting completely overwhelmed and ending up doing nothing.
When we feel our most inspired, the urge to create is so strong that we can get a little blindsided. We forget that we also need to rest and we make our plans a little too optimistic.
Or we jump around between different ideas, each better and the last one, perhaps forget old projects and struggle to stick with anything. These are the risks with going a little too wholeheartedly into that bright energy of spring.
A happy, balanced spring
Spring can be a wonderful season for creating. We can of course do whatever creative work we’re pulled towards, but spring is especially well suited for these types of work:
Getting started with a new project.
Blowing life and energy into an existing project.
Rethinking and trying again in an area where you’ve struggled.
Getting momentum and energy in making something happen.
Any project that consist of many smaller ideas.
Launching something you’ve been working on.
To reel things in a bit so spring don’t leave you overwhelmed and overworked, I would suggest doing three things.
Firstly, choose one main focus. We don’t use our energy in the best way when we try to do a hundred different things. Instead, choose to do less and do them really well. It’ll be more satisfactory in the end, I promise.
Secondly, save your ideas. In a period when we are getting lots of ideas, we can’t pursue them all. That doesn’t mean they’re bad ideas, you just have to prioritise which you’ll do at the moment and which to save. Keep a journal where you can jot down your ideas. Believe me, there’ll come a day when you feel like you’ve completely run out of them and you’ll be happy to open it and get inspired again.
Thirdly, make space for slow. With all that energy, we can forget that we need the slow too. But we do, and we’ll be able to use our energy much better if we don’t run ourselves into the ground. So find ways of incorporating slow into your spring. Perhaps a daily walk looking for the newest spring signs?
Spring can be an excellent season for creative work. We just have to tame and channel that energy in a good and healthy way, so we don’t overwhelm ourselves in the process.
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