Junk Drawer

It’s Sunday afternoon. It’s raining.

I just put Luna down for a nap. Daniel is asleep on the couch. We both did an hour in the middle of the night last night and Sunday is his morning shift.

I look out the window. Leaves are slowly falling off the willow tree in our garden, making fluffy yellow piles on the ground. It’s raining. It doesn’t feel like winter.

We go to New Zealand in two weeks, mirroring the trip we took two years ago with a two month old. Now she’s two years old and life feels so different to then.

The weeks before something big often feels like liminal space. Time spent just waiting for the thing. It passes slowly or quickly and then the thing happens and then it’s back to the non-thing.

When I came downstairs, I was tempted to do something practical, by which I mean buy something we “need” for the trip. I then thought that would not be a very fulfilling way to spend this time, and drew a picture of the leaves on the ground in the garden.

Towards the end of the summer I embarked on a giant weeding project, pulling up a network of weeds that had taken over one whole patch of grass. It took several sittings, over several weeks, which turned into months. I still have one tiny segment to do, which glares at me from under the fallen leaves. I probably won’t get to it before we go. I definitely won’t get to it before we go.

There is a lot I didn’t do this year that I said I would do. Paint our front door. Repaint our peeling kitchen cabinets. Find a yoga class. Get involved in our new community.

I’m slowly making peace with a list that never ends. It’s a list I made up anyway. The quieter list is all the stuff I did do while worrying about the stuff I didn’t.

I spend a lot of time doing logistics and thinking through dilemmas at work. These are the things that take up a lot of time, but when I look back at my week, I can’t seem to remember what I did. There are some day-to-day tasks that must be done. But every time I manage to pull myself off of the treadmill, I am grateful for the time I spent doing something else.

I still don’t really know what this space is for, but I’m glad that I have it. I journal to dump my stream-of-consciousness, often to process how I feel on any give day, often if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed or need to steady myself. It is different than Junk Drawer.

I come here to capture a moment in time, both the immediate sensory experience, and what it stirs up for me that is bigger than that moment.

I notice how much time I spend writing about time.

Sometimes a powerful revelation will happen in my journal, and I wish it was a Junk Drawer. Sometimes the detail fuelling this revelation wouldn’t be appropriate to share in a public forum. I’m still working out how to communicate thoughts and lessons that come from a situation that needs to stay protected.

I like that this is a space separate from work. But I care about and learn from my work and often want to explore that in more detail. Creativity is one of my deepest-held values. I believe that everyone deserves access to art because art makes life better. And I use “art” in the broadest possible meaning of the word. This belief powers many of my personal and professional choices. I am lucky enough that my paid work currently contributes to this mission.

I work in an industry that has built structures around art, in theory, to protect it and enable people to participate in it. But a highly exclusive group of people set up these structures and they are flawed. They often act as barriers instead of an open door, and my work asks me to confront this reality regularly. I am driven to knock these barriers down as much as possible, even if the door is locked and it takes busting through a wall. Many people and organisations are doing this in exciting, revolutionary ways. But real, deep, large-scale change is hard and slow. And expensive.

Often my experiences at work meaningfully shape how I engage with my personal mission going forward. At the same time, a strong boundary between work and life is essential and keeps me resilient. These two truths are tricky to reconcile sometimes. Creativity in my own life and my job are clearly two different things. But creative ideas and a better infrastructure that enables people to access creativity are both things that wake me up at 4am.

I’m glad I spent time here instead of scrolling for a 18-24 months toddler sun hat on Vinted. I will probably still do that before we go. I will definitely still do that before we go.

On Friday night, I put some festive lights on a few stray pine branches in the centre of our dinner table. These two weeks could just be spent waiting. Or we could find little ways to make every day feel bright.