Miyazaki's Cigarette and Sisyphus' Boulder
1,302 Days of Creativity NO SKIPS!
Earlier this year, I saw this meme featuring legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki deep in his creative process. (The cigarette to garden to cigarette pipeline gets me every time.) I kept referring back to it so much that I went to its source, the 2019 NHK documentary, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.
But if you said, “Why don’t you quit?”
I’d just say, “Shut up.”—Hayao Miyazaki
When I watched this docuseries, I found myself most drawn to all of these in-between moments. When Miyazaki walks around his neighborhood, greeting the children on his block. When he smokes cigarettes on the balcony looking out at the sea. When he chats with his long-time collaborators while making coffee. When he sets up a video camera in his car and watches the footage back with fresh eyes. When he takes naps. Throughout this decade of time overseeing multiple projects, he expresses doubt constantly. He is irritable. He routinely runs his hands through his hair as if his head were a snow globe, shaking the ideas inside into a flurry. “Inspiration is everything,” he says, while cranking a pencil into a sharpener. All of these moments, which seem like charming ways to procrastinate, are in the pursuit of inspiration. They are as much part of his creative process as when he finally puts his paintbrush to paper.
I’m always interested in learning the creative processes of artists I admire, but I find myself actively searching for this knowledge when I’m considering changes to my own. I crave novelty and validation—some untapped insight, a cheat code for consistent quality output! What I found in Miyazaki’s process is that maintaining inspiration is a craft in itself. The twin efforts of observation and expression require a mental and emotional priming centered on openness. A landing and launch pad. As silly as it sounds, the cigarette on the balcony is part of a discipline—you inhale the world around you, but your breath makes the smoke bloom.
One of the best feelings is when inspiration strikes like lightning, blazing branches of ideas. Creativity appears the most intense and joyful in these rare bouts. But what about the rest of the time? I realized Miyazaki does not wait idly for these thunderbolts. Instead, he spends his time cultivating himself into something that attracts them. Yes, even during nap time! And when he’s still stuck, he finds other ways to chase the storm.
Today marks DAY 1302—NO SKIPS!—of Creative 20, the daily creative practice my friend
and I started three and a half years ago. I’ve written about it previously here: Our 200-Day Creative Streak and here 365 Days of Creativity NO SKIPS, and it felt like time to reflect again. To recap, every day we spend 20 minutes, give or take, working on a creative project. We text each other what we did, sometimes with a photo, a brief description, and/or a request for feedback, delivered in equal parts frustration and hype.
Accountability and encouragement from a friend goes a long way, but what I’ve come to appreciate most is the mutual witnessing to the daily progress and struggle of just trying. Just trying! It’s incremental and cumulative. The act is as mundane as any habit, but each day we count becomes its own milestone. Since starting Creative 20, Felipe and I are not hit by constant shocks of inspiration, but they do occur more often. We’ve kept a current going, always buzzing in the background. And even on the days we feel depleted, there’s always some reserve of power ready to spark.
It’s funny charting your own feelings towards creativity—it’s an extension of yourself, and yet it can feel like an entirely different character—friend, foe, and foil. Like Miyazaki, I often feel the angst, the blank stare at the page, and my own hands running through my hair, tugging at the roots.
In the last 3.5 years of Creative 20, I’ve wrestled on-and off with creativity feeling like a chore. (The gratitude reframe here is, “I don’t HAVE to do this, I GET to do this.) I texted my friend Jon about this last year, and realized I wasn’t alone.
And after much thought, I think that’s ok. It’s ok for creativity to feel like a chore. It’s normal. Great, even! Ok, it doesn’t feel great, but discomfort is a direction. I understand it now as a sign for me to shift more into the craft of maintaining inspiration over the craft of pushing expression. Instead of begrudging myself this feeling, I can be curious about it. Perhaps my heightened expectations around creativity reject other less sparkly, but ever necessary elements, like friction and vulnerability. Perhaps I should invite them in, too.
Even Miyazaki feels like Sisyphus, that dude Zeus punished by making him roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down every time. We call a “Sisyphean task” something that requires a lot of endless effort for little result. Too often, we code our own creative attempts as futile when we can’t reach the ideal, imagined summit. But we also neglect that Sisyphus is quite strong, and it’s because he’s had all that strength training. No creative effort is futile. Keep it rolling.
Thanks for reading.
The days have flown by! It remains an honor to be your accountability buddy in your daily creative chore. Thank you
Congratulations! 🍻 To 1302 more days!