Dear friends,
This week, I’ve wrestled with how to bring the discoveries of recent weeks back into the life I’d left behind. The tendency nowadays is to present answers, yet I find it more helpful to share the questioning itself — the internal tussle.
So I’m continuing in diary form, mapping the uneasy shift from living fully to finding myself back in our modern world of lists, projects, and screens.
I feel refreshed, but also determined not to let go.
Today’s Substack explores how we carry what matters most into the work that still calls us.
Love,
Jim
p.s. A special & personal entry for my paid Subscribers: thank you for all the ways you support The Creative Life
Monday 1 September
After being away so long, you notice more than ever how filtered modern life has become toward the digital.
Arriving back, my perception has splintered.
Yes, I’ve brought myself back from the precipice of digital nihilism.
Of the digital, I had to ask the hard question: Do I want you in my life?
And yet, the harder question nowadays is: What does a world without you in my life even look like?
Maybe this constant wanting of something other is just a form of childishness.
And yet — with reality so deconstructed, stolen even, by the giants of Silicon Valley — is it not to reclaim your vitality by venting these whims?
No, it is not childishness.
It is the decision to reclaim your soul.
Now, back in the city, back in Berlin, I long for the great breath of my travels.
It felt good: to be outside every day.
To clamber over rocks.
To bathe in lochs, rivers, and seas.
To squeal in horror and delight as the icy shock crackled through my system.
I had so far to go that even if I’d tried, I couldn’t have kept up with myself — and the byproduct was that I finally caught up with my Self.
Not my goals, not my dreams, not my projects — but my living self.
Had I forgotten analogue me?
It’s not that I resist returning, nor that I resist what lies ahead.
It is just a surprise.
To remember how very well you live away from all you work on.
If I examine that feeling — where the idea takes me — it leads me to what matters most.
And I can’t shy from the paradox that what so often feels like it matters most is a detour from what really matters most.
We convince ourselves that by chasing these modern fantasies, we’ll arrive at what matters most.
It was there all along, idiot!
I know, I know; life calls us — the life of work, the slow melting of the self into the digital.
But is the life that calls really the one I want to build?
Have I examined that question enough?
I cannot get away from the fact that the life I tasted again in Scotland drenched me in its embrace — then reanimated me.
OK, OK.
To work.
But in your work, don’t forget your own realisations!
Work with them.
Work within them.
See where incorporating this new knowledge leads — dare to!
REVERENCE.
Ah, yes, that’s what returned to me:
Reverence.
The feeling that all that needs to be done is to gasp at the sight before you, or better —bow down before it.
I have, once again, uncovered life.
That is all the mission is about;
To live —
To live, all the way,
Reckless
Rejoicing
Expending energy, yes,
But never to the point where the exhaustion steals your capacity to marvel.
Your work should be to express life —
Or better,
A way to stay plugged into its mainframe.
It sizzles in me still.
Corscades.
Can I keep with it, now that I have returned?
I remember this feeling —
And question how it ever could be lost.
Tuesday 2 September
Photo of Mahalla, where my creative office is based
UNSURE.
I am not sure what to do.
Find something to be excited by.
If it is not there —
It is okay to wait awhile.
When it comes:
Follow it.
LISTS.
I feel an utter aversion to lists.
Usually, it’s my mainstay.
Or at least what drives things forward.
How funny:
That's when I’m at my healthiest —
I disregard everything they advise.
SPACE
The advantage of space?
It allows you to hear your mind.
LAZY
To be lazy?
Something we have lost the ability to do.
From this point on:
I will trust only you —
You who have the capacity to be lazy.
In the age of compulsion:
Is that not a superpower?
DANIELA’S KIND MESSAGE:
MY RESPONSE
I’m just back in Berlin, and this lands right in me.
Maybe because I haven’t landed yet.
I don’t feel close to what I am to do or what is next.
But I do feel close to me.
Despite some uncertainty, I’m okay with that as a basis.
And your words remind me of my own North Star —
The one I resist
But which I am always drawn back to.
Thank you
Wednesday 3rd September
CONSISTENCY?
Strange to be back in life and looking around, wondering where to pick up the thread.
It transpires I rather like chilling!
BATTLE
Battle all day with my new YouTube video.
Well, not the video, but with the packaging.
Recently, I started working with my friend Nat on the channel.
Despite enjoying making videos for YouTube, I can’t quite get the platform.
Wrestle with the thumbnail.
It is a job I have zero love for.
In fact, my perception so far is that the worse I make the thumbnail, the better the video seems to do.
Send some over to Nat, who swiftly sends them back with a gentle D- mark, haha.
He says:
“The packaging is not the artwork, the package is the advert”
This makes a lot of sense to me.
Since I don’t like ads, I’m liberated to make peace with thumbnails I don’t really love.
Bah.
Sometimes don’t even like haha!
Anyway.
Here is the new video:
It’s about how breaks from our projects so easily turn into blocks.
Before leaving - after weeks of client work — The Wall Street Journal, three music videos, a documentary, and a short film — I finally picked up the camera on my first day back to my own project.
Damn, ain’t it hard sometimes to pick up the thread — even when every part of you is yearning to!
In the video, I share some of the tools I use to cross that bridge — from where I was to where I am.
EVENING
Take photos for Ben Barritt’s wonderful release show. A privilege to behold, and a joyous celebration. There’s nothing like being inspired by an old friend — when their journey brings you back to your own.
Thursday 4th September
Yes, that’s what it is.
I am again in my living potential.
That is, independent of goals, results, projects, fantasies, and needs.
Each of us has it, yet how quick we are to forget it.
In this age of dilution, of dissipation and distraction — that is the first thing we lose.
The very thing which is the gateway to ourselves.
What a wonder it is to know — that all these cravings, longings, dreamings, aspirings — are just other ways to get to what is already within us, potentially.
Every step I take to look at a screen less is a commitment to the type of living I want more of.
Friday 5th September
Today, I need to lean hard into the shadow that is hanging over me.
Last night was a sleepless, mosquito-bitten frenzy—tossing and turning, wired with too much coffee, staring into the endless dark, persecuted by questions I thought I’d already answered.
Yes, maybe I paid for being overexcited yesterday, for the discovery of my zeal.
Isn’t that the paradox?
You come back with a space inside yourself, determined to keep hold of it. But then, triggered by longing, by excitement, by the chance to create—bang—you slip into habits that kill your momentum just as you reach the first turn.
Ach, it’s ok.
That is life.
I scraped myself out of bed, changed my plans, and headed straight to Mahalla.
At the entrance, I saw Ralf.
“Good day,” I said.
“Is it?” he replied—then, after a beat, broke into a mirthy grin.
I cackled, realising:
Yes, today can be good.
One of the things we must remember is that despite our hopes to turn a page, to get into a good rhythm, to build better habits — life will always find its way to make you dance out of kilter.
You’re not meant to know its dance in advance, despite our best efforts for control.
And so, here I am.
Back at my desk.
Outside, Mahalla buzzes, composing itself for the unbridled celebration that is Berlin’s Art Week.
My desk stares back at me, not hauntingly or with a grimace, but with its ever-present prod: yes, you too have a life to compose.
I’m tired, yes, but beneath it I feel the buzz of my best self—unwilling to yield to circumstance.
Why the hell can’t it be a good day, even if it begins with the feeling that it’s still conjoined to yesterday?
And so, here I am.
Staring at my life’s 1000 questions.
I know, I know.
I must start with all the ones I’ve so enjoyed ignoring while Scotland whisked me away in its dreaming.
Ach, the spiralling light, the dashing sparrows, the singing heather, the shape-shifting clouds—all return to me.
We are in life, so in life — even in its passing.
I wasn’t ready to come back.
I had the feeling I’d just crossed a threshold, stepped through its gateway. Sometimes that’s what it takes now to untether from this digitalised world—where we’re force-fed notifications and convinced our WhatsApps are a worthy substitute for actually knowing someone.
The paradox: every post makes you more visible to strangers, and less known to those you love.
One I love said to me:
“I miss the you I know, away from the masks.”
It hammered a nail through my heart.
I felt judged.
Damn, never wore a mask — just choose to keep the private private.
I realised: that’s the point.
If people don’t know you in person, they only compose their own version of you — shaped by whatever mood they bring to your work in that moment.
If I started again, no friend or family would know anything about my online life.
You could have just called, or come to visit, I wanted to say.
But the conversation broke off, and the unsaid lingered, then dissipated into the air.
That is the paradox of creative life today.
Yes, there are boons — the small triumphs, the fleeting apotheosis of finishing and presenting something. But for most of us, most of the time, life is lived in the long tail.
And if you are an artist living in the long tail, you must, at some stage — whether you like it or not — reconcile the tension between the digital and the physical.
Last month, I was in life.
Life only.
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