The River We Stand In
Navigating the changing currents of a creative life and career
Fall is a season of change. For artists and creatives it’s often a time of shifting priorities and increased momentum in our professional and creative lives. Our creative work and life become more structured, calendars fill up, networking and reconnecting take on greater importance, and the pace and intensity of our work often picks up. For many of us this season also brings a sense of pressure, uncertainty, and the challenge of adjusting to new rhythms, experiences and expectations.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we approach and experience change, particularly through my work with clients who are navigating many types of transitions. Whether pursuing new trajectories, entering the next chapters of their careers, or stepping into new levels or arenas of their professional lives. These transitions can be exciting and deeply wanted, but they aren't always easy. Even when we choose them, they can require us to let go of familiar routines, identities, expectations, and ways of working. As one client recently expressed to me, “It feels like I’ve worked so hard to get to the top of this mountain and now everything ahead of me is totally new territory.” Even positive change can be destabilizing.
Every creative life is shaped not only by the work we make, but by the many transitions we experience along the way. Some changes are chosen: a new medium, a new direction, a different kind of work, a decision to grow a creative business or step into leadership. Others arrive uninvited: rejection, burnout, financial uncertainty, loss, technological disruption, or circumstances that require us to adapt or pivot. As someone who has navigated some pretty significant changes in my creative career and in coaching other artists and creatives to do the same, I've come to see that learning how to move through these changes and how to navigate new territory is, in my experience, one of the most important and often least talked about parts of building a sustainable creative life and career.
Perhaps that's why I've always been drawn to a quote that spans the Queen Street Viaduct over the Don River in Toronto, a bridge I pass frequently when I'm cycling, walking, or driving east toward home:
"This river I step in is not the river I stand in."
The words, inspired by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and installed as part of a 1996 public art project, Time and a Clock by Eldon Garnet, have spoken to me for years. Lately, they've taken on even more meaning as I've watched the remarkable restoration and renaturalization of the Don River unfold nearby. The river has been transformed, and yet it remains the river. Its course continues, even as its landscape and currents change. It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for a creative life. We may recognize the person, the career, and the work we began with, but the river is always moving. So are we.
In my work as a coach, I have the privilege of exploring with clients the many kinds of change that artists and creative professionals encounter over the course of a career. The changes we choose and the ones we don't, the ones we anticipate and the ones that catch us by surprise.
What I've come to appreciate is that there is no single way to navigate these changing currents. Sometimes we need to let go. Sometimes we need to adapt. Sometimes we need to find our footing in entirely new territory. And sometimes, before we can do any of those things, we simply need to acknowledge that the river we're standing in is no longer the one we stepped into.
Change isn't an interruption to a creative career and life. It is part of our creative career and life.
The question, then, isn't whether the river will change. It will. The question is how we learn to move with it and how, over time, we become someone who can.
What is changing in your creative work and life right now and what might it be asking you to notice, release, or reconsider?
Later in the Month — For Paid Subscribers
I’ll explore : what it actually means to put change into practice, and how practicing change can eventually make the unfamiliar feel more natural.
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