“I find that having a day job is one of the best things
that in the world that could happen to me,” he once said.
“It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life,
I am just as free as I want to be and of course
I have nothing to worry about the money.”
Wallace Stevens, American Poet, as quoted in
Daily Ritual: How Artists Work by Mason Curry

It’s not a surprise that working a day job interferes with nurturing my creativity.  I need it – predictably – to pay the bills, provide benefits for my family, and to foster a valuable career.  I’m thankful to have a good job, although it hasn’t happened by accident.  God has blessed me richly with my employment, in addition to a lot of work and hard effort.

But how do I reconcile the two – my creativity and my employment, especially when I’m working a lot of overtime?

There are several ways I frame this up for myself, to keep myself encouraged when it seems my photography and writing are far from me in my daily life:

• My commute to work is short.
• I’ve learned discipline.
• I am exposed to all kinds of technology.
• I have a highly developed business knowledge.
• I have the money to do my photography and writing.

My Commute Time

I have my daughter to thank for this one, when one day during year end close, I was complaining about all the overtime.  She pointed out how short my commute was by today’s standards.  Most days it’s 30 minutes one way, more or less.  If I lived closer to her in Atlanta, my commute could easily stretch to 1 to 1.5 hours one way.  If I lived in the Chicago suburbs and worked downtown, it would be the same between the train ride and walking from the train station to and from work.

So while I work a lot of overtime at various times during the year, I’m not sitting in the car in traffic.  My field requires large amounts of overtime, which would be worse if I worked in consulting.  My overtime is fairly limited by comparison and a short commute makes it easier on my personal life.

I’ve Learned Discipline

Do I feel like being at work every day?  No, of course not.  But I show up, regardless of how I feel about it.  People depend on me and it’s part of the job.

Nurturing my creativity is the same.  I don’t feel like going out to take pictures some days.  It can be a fair amount of work and effort to show up when the light is right, especially if that happens to be 5:30 am or 9:30 pm (sunrise versus night photography).  That picture above?  I took it at 7:30 am.  By then, my daughter and I had been up for over an hour, having dressed for a cold morning, driven to Acadia National Park, left the car and walked the path to that part of Witch Hole Pond.  The path was uphill most of the way to the pond too (but very worth it).

It’s easy to be undisciplined with my hobbies – to keep reading, watching television, or even cooking another meal instead of going out to use my camera or sitting at my computer to write or process pictures.  It’s even easier to decide I’m too tired to learn something new or try another technique and keeping doing the same old things.  I wrote more extensively about this on the post, Creativity versus Craft.

But if want satisfaction, I have to be as disciplined as I am at work.  Well, okay, maybe not quite as disciplined.  It’s supposed to be fun after all and not another drain on my emotions!

But I have to show up, learn, push myself to do new things, and most of all, just be there.  Just like today – I’m up early before work to write this, having worked late again last night and then gone to bed early.

So I think I’ll stop here and write about the rest of my points in my next post, as well as share a little more about Wallace Stevens who is quoted above.

Have a good day!

Click here for Part 2 of Working A Day Job.

To see everything I’m doing with my 31 Days of Nurturing My Creativity, click here.

To see what others are doing with their 31 Days project, click here.

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