Every Friday between now and the beginning of February, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from my third book, CARE: The radical art of taking time. This is in part to celebrate her release in the UK and North America, and in part to say thank you for being part of this wonderful corner of the internet throughout 2022.
Today’s excerpt is from Chapter 5: Making where I explore the ways we can create and how it relates to care. I hope it inspires you to make something over the weekend!
Much love,
Brooke xx
A reminder that Ben and I are offline until the beginning of February, so I’m not around to respond to comments until then. Enjoy your weekend and I’ll catch you soon.
It feels as though we have gone full capitalist on creativity.
We tend to only value it if it makes us money, or if it makes our employer money: Musicians are lauded when they sell out bigger and bigger venues. Creative directors are admired and promoted if their advertising campaign results in record sales. An artist becomes a household name once their work reaches a certain pricepoint.
We don't attach the same value to the busker who makes enough money to buy a couple of days' worth of groceries, or the employee who lakes a risk and fails, and we typically ignore the homespun efforts of the enthusiastic crafter unless they're particularly good, in which case we tell them earnestly, “You should sell these at markets!”
I've fallen into this trap before, when a resin-jewellery-making hobby accidentally became a full-time job because I needed to justify the time I spent working on it, and the only way to do so was to try to make money from it.
Within months of starting my hobby, I'd begun my own little label. The first few local markets were enjoyable (particularly the part where strangers would give me money) but over time I realised that while there were parts of the process I still enjoyed, namely the tinkering and experimentation, they'd been overshadowed by the scale of the work.
Yes, I still spent hours creating, but now I needed to create en masse, on deadline, making thirty rings where I used to make one. As I began exhibiting at larger, fancier markets, I was asked about wholesale prices and whether I had local stockists and, if not, would I offer them exclusive distribution. Soon came the commercial gift fairs and the realisation that the prices I was charging would never allow me to be financially sustainable, so then came the business coaching.
Within a few years l'd gone from a purely enjoyable creative hobby to grinding through the daily running of a business I never meant to start. From the joy of making to work in no time flat.
We've attached a dollar sign to creativity and so have stripped away what the crafters and gardeners and tinkerers and edge-of-the-notebook doodlers among us know: creating stuff is fun. It’s joyful and satisfying and challenging, regardless of whether what we make is permanent (a handknit scarf), temporary (a meal cooked for friends) or even less tangible than that (a dance performed to an audience of one – you, waiting for your porridge to cook).
When we make something, we rearrange the very atoms of the world we live in. We shift the order of them around, and, no matter what else comes after, they will never be the same again.
Creativity is inextricably tied to the notion of care and is something that should feel available to us all, but like so many other worthy, powerful ideas, it has been co-opted and overcomplicated, twisted into something that is only valued in monetary terms.
It's precisely because of this that I wanted to spend time digging into the joys and hidden power of simply making things.
What kind of things can we coax into existence – using our hands, brains, bodies, mouths and actions?
We can make bread or music. We can make paintings. Dance. Pasta. Trinkets and books and letters and sketches on the back of napkins. We make gardens and wonky ceramic bowls and pesto. We bring ideas to life. We make things to wear. Things to eat. Things to look at, to play with, to make ourselves heard. Things to use and things that are useless.
Humans are wired to create. We're wired to tell stories and make music and prepare food and build shelter and produce art. We're wired to adorn our bodies and our homes with creations. To offer them as gifts, to treasure them.
None of these things are accidents. Even in the most freakish of circumstances, where the clay soil becomes the perfect consistency for making earthenware pottery, even then, it would never form the shape of a bowl without someone shaping it. Never accidentally sit in the sun for the required hours. Never find its way to a pot of glaze. Never fall into a fire and fall back out again once it was ready for use.
Many of us ignore our innate need to make things. We have grown up in a world where convenience is king and the golden glow of the new, the store-bought, the shiny and on-trend is queen. Why bother making something from scratch when we can just order it online and have it delivered to our front door the next day? Within the hour even?
We spend so much of our time in passive consumption mode, inhaling products and food and information, much of it dressed as entertainment or convenience: TV shows, endless news cycles, social media, ready-made meals, fast fashion served up in micro-seasonal trends that are too cheap to ignore.
But when Covid hit, it was like an unconscious collective light bulb went off and suddenly many of us realised that on some deep level we needed to make. Perhaps it was because so much of the news was scary, or because so many of yesterday's certainties were now uncertain, that making offered us a distraction.
Maybe for some of us it was simply boredom or the very real possibility that our financial situation could soon look quite different and we were going to need to learn how to DIY some of the things we used to buy.
Whatever brought it about, many of us found we simply had to use our hands, our brains, our bodies to bring new things into the world.
For a lot of people, that new thing was bread.
Perhaps it was the sense of comfort, homeliness, security or nourishment it offered, perhaps it was the smell, or the Instagram bragging rights afforded to anyone who managed to bake a nice-looking loaf of sourdough from scratch.
For others, crafts became the expression of creativity we needed. I finally took the opportunity to start (and surprisingly finish) a baby blanket for my youngest nephew – and was delighted to see that he had outgrown it by the time he received it on his first birthday.
Seedlings and seeds were a hot commodity all of a sudden as thousands of people decided to make a garden. Add to that our very real concerns about food security and there were gardens of all shapes and sizes popping up on balconies, in courtyards and in backyards all over the place.
Some people played music for the first time in years or took the opportunity to learn a new instrument. Some recipe-related searches were up by more than 800 per cent as more people began cooking at home, and the creation of funny videos on TikTok and Instagram skyrocketed.
Whether forcefully or otherwise, our lives slowed down, and for many people that meant we were still enough to hear the inner voice, yearning to make a mark, to leave something behind in an intentional act of creation, an exercise in presence and the joy of bringing something new into being while blocking out the noise of a world that won't stop pushing us to consume, to take, to use up.
Lockdown gave us an opportunity to quieten at least some of that noise, and our collective inner wisdom took the opportunity to whisper quietly in our ears, that maybe that compulsion to constantly do, scroll and buy could be better satisfied by the single-mindedness of making.
When we're talking care, both of ourselves and of others, therapy is an incredibly valuable tool, one that I've used many times over the years. But when we talk about therapy, what do we actually mean? Is it solely the domain of psychologists and counsellors, or is there scope for a broader definition of what therapy can look like?
How often have you heard someone refer to cooking or singing or knitting or dancing as their ‘therapy’? The suggestion being that it offers them a similar reprieve from the worries and problems of their lives in the same way traditional therapy does.
I know I've referred to gardening that way many times over the years, as it allows me to escape again and again: to get outside, to decompress, to distract myself from the stresses and anxieties of day-to-day life.
In fact, after I was diagnosed with severe postnatal depression in 2011, I rediscovered myself through the act of making a garden. It was a place where the rush and noise and pressure of life felt distant, where I was able to drift away from much of the deep depression I felt by digging and trimming and mulching and watering and fertilising and planting.
All of these fairly simple tasks, all quite repetitive, were so powerful in giving me the space I so badly needed: the ability to get out of my head and away from the noise for an hour or two.
Perhaps you might replace gardening with cooking, knitting, woodworking, whittling, leatherwork, jewellery making, pottery, dancing, singing, writing poetry, sketching, sculpting, painting, playing an instrument, redecorating your living room, arranging your bookshelf by colour, painting your nails or making your own beauty products, or perhaps you've yet to find your therapy.
Regardless, it turns out that calling our creative pursuits therapy isn't just a neat way to sum up the personal benefits we experience when making something. In fact, there's a whole heap of research that shows making things is incredibly good for us, so much so that, much like forest bathing, crafting is now being prescribed by GPs and therapists in some parts of the world as an accompaniment to antidepressants. This is known as social prescribing', where doctors refer patients to non-clinical therapies such as art and craft classes.
Research has also shown that making things can:
reduce stress
activate our parasympathetic nervous system and help
us to feel calmer
help our brain's reward centre release dopamine, the
feel-good neurotransmitter
foster feelings of pride and satisfaction as we learn
and master new skills
elevate our mood
significantly delay the onset of cognitive conditions such
as dementia and Alzheimer's disease
decrease anxious rumination in people living with various
mental illnesses
improve self-esteem
increase levels of self-efficacy, which means we're better
equipped to face our own challenges and deal with disappointments.
Making also helps us to meditate, in one form or another. Many acts of making, particularly those that involve repetitive movements such as stirring, stitching and strumming, help our brains to enter a meditative state and in this kind of active meditation we experience many of the same benefits as we would when doing a sitting meditation (think improved sleep, improved memory function and increased self-awareness).
Related to this idea of active meditation is something called our ‘flow state’. Have you ever been so absorbed in making or doing something that you lose track of time? Or that your body seemingly ceases to exist for a moment?
That blissful state of engrossment is called a flow state, and much of the research around the role of creativity in happiness and mental wellbeing revolves around the idea of accessing it.
In short, a flow state is powerful: you are simultaneously productive and feel great. You don't have to force yourself to work hard; instead completing the task seems to come almost automatically, as if you are ‘flowing’ through your work.
When we enter a flow state we benefit from a high level of concentration and a feeling of clarity about what needs to be done. We also sense a lack of obstacles as the thoughts and feelings that generally cloud our minds – stress, worry and self-doubt-disappear for a while, at the same time as you find a deep pleasure in whatever you're doing.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the psychologist who first recognised and named the psychological concept of flow and described it as “the secret to happiness” not only because of the enjoyment of the task at hand but also the general sense of wellbeing, happiness and fulfilment that follow even after you've moved on to do something else.
Csikszentmihalyi's theory is that when we're engrossed in a task that has us operating in a state of flow – knitting a jumper for example – our brains are temporarily unable to process other, non-essential information, which means our physical awareness disappears, pain and discomfort can fade, concerns and stresses and doubts cease to take up real estate in our brains.
It leaves us feeling removed from time, removed from our normal reality and all that it entails, giving us a reprieve from discomforts and pains and worries that may otherwise plague us.
In short, making heals, and perhaps there's no better story to exemplify this than that of the St Paul’s Cathedral altar frontal and the World War I soldiers who made it.
During World War I, millions of soldiers were injured in battle and required long periods of rehabilitation in one of the many hospitals and convalescent homes throughout the world. Many of these soldiers suffered severe injuries including the loss of limbs, spinal injuries and permanent severe pain due to nerve damage or shrapnel wounds, not to mention the tens of thousands who suffered what was then known as ‘shell shock’ (what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder).
In an attempt to help these soldiers recuperate, and in some instances help them retrain their brains and hands to function again, many were taught handicrafts in convalescent homes in the United Kingdom.
Some soldiers learnt basket weaving or leatherwork, while others learnt to embroider. Between the summers of 1918 and 1919, more than a hundred allied soldiers in hospitals and convalescent homes all over England worked on small individual embroidery projects, which were then sent to the Royal School of Needlework in London and stitched onto an altar frontal.
Even though I've only ever looked at it in photos online, I can see that this cloth is genuinely beautiful. I have to admit I was taken aback at how delicately and skilfully it was made, how the intricately stitched birds and flowers and vines are so finely sewn as to look like a watercolour painting rather than needlework.
The individual pieces in different shades of blue, green, yellow, purple and gold were created by individual men each locked in their own struggles, who found solace or pride or healing or purpose in their work.
Used for the first time at the national service of thanksgiving for peace at the end of the war in July 1919, the cloth remained in use for many years, until the cathedral was bombed during the London Blitz in World War Il. It was long thought that the cloth had been destroyed but it had actually been packed away, survived the Blitz and remained in storage for 70 years, largely forgotten. It was rediscovered by a researcher in 2004 and a team of volunteers spent the better part of a decade restoring the work of the soldiers.
Ahead of the centennial commemoration of the outbreak of World War Il, researchers at St Paul's tracked down relatives of many of the men who worked on the cloth and invited them to attend a service in August 2014, where the restored altar frontal was used for the first time in more than seven decades.
Since then the cloth has been used during services commemorating the 100-year anniversary of armistice, and services where hundreds of schoolchildren sang in front of it after studying the lives of the men who created it.
This beautiful piece not only offered therapy and healing to the men who helped make it but also continued to bring people together many years after the last of them was gone. The cloth shows how making can bring healing – both physical and mental – and that making has the capacity to bring us together.
At the heart of this small story lies the question of what might happen if we let the solace and healing and connections of creativity seep into our world?
Improved health, peace of mind, an ability to distance ourselves temporarily from pain and suffering: what if we let these ripples spread out, making more ripples and waves as they go? What might that world look like?
10 ways to practise making if you have…
Half a minute:
Wear a new outfit combination
Doodle on the train
Sing a completely made-up song
Half an hour:
Create a visual journal of your day
Make a batch of playdough and create shapes or words or characters
Make something out of LEGO
Build a sandcastle.
Half a day or more:
Write a short story
Make a short video about one of your favourite days/trips/people
Create a family dance routine.
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