Fill the Well by Living the Life You Chose
To live a rich and creative life, we need to fill our well.
The well is everything you collect just by being awake inside your own life. Images, ideas, sensations, colors that pull you in. A walk around the neighborhood. A museum visit. A dinner out with friends. A leaf you found, a comedian you saw, a cloud formation slowly passing by as you sit still.
None of that is art yet; it's the raw material. It goes down into the well and mixes with everything else you've ever taken in, waiting for the day you reach for it — sometimes deliberately, but far more often without any idea that's what you're doing. The pot you throw next month will have a curve in it you saw on a walk in October. You won't remember the specifics of the walk. The well remembers for you.
When you bring up the bucket…
It all comes together in ways you couldn’t have thought through ahead of time.
A well doesn't fill itself
It's a lovely way to think about it… but most of the time we don't fill our well up intentionally. It gets clogged up with whatever is floating by.
What happens instead is this: we talk about what we love, we mean it, and then we spend all week going through the motions — reacting to what comes across our screens, or to whoever reached out to ask us for something. And that starts to feel flat. It feels busy. It feels like obligations and tasks and not living on purpose. You end the week tired, with nothing in the bucket, wondering why it feels so hard to walk into the studio.
Your values are the compass
The way you spend your days varies due to so many things. Your job, where you live, the disposable income or resources available to you, your spare time, kids and family care responsibilities, other commitments you've made. But the biggest, most central compass underneath all those variables is your personal values.
And I don't mean values broadly, like kindness or honesty or family exactly. I find it more helpful to think of values as "what's important to me."
Just ask: what really drives my decisions and choices? And I mean when you're feeling good, like after the first cup of coffee on a Saturday and a walk around the block — not what drives your decisions when you're hungry and tired and stressed at the end of a long day. I also don't mean what you think would sound good. "Faith, family and service," although some of that may well be true. Get a little more granular and raw with it.
The shortcut is to stop asking what you value and start noticing what lights you up. Look back over the last month. What made you lose track of time? What did you tell three different people about? What made you take a spontaneous photo? Those aren't random. Line them up and the common theme is usually sitting right there, obvious, waiting for you to see it.
The artist statement I couldn't live up to
Here's my own example. When I started back into making art in 2020, trying to get serious about it, I wrote this lofty artist's statement about creating work around the concept of home. Which was a cool idea. It made me think. But I really wasn't living a life exploring that concept. I'd written the statement first and hoped life would catch up.
Then I made a series of paintings about concussion and brain trauma — the science of it and the experience of it, which had been my actual daily life for twenty years. And it felt good to make that work, because I wasn't reaching for something. I was pouring out of a well that was already full.
For a minute I thought, well, I know a lot about that topic, so I'll make that my thing. But even though neuro-rehab and brain injury will always be part of my past experience, I'm not adding to that well anymore, and it isn't what I want shaping my life and my art going forward. So I had to go further back and ask what's actually been driving me the whole time.
Three forces I keep coming back to
As long as I can remember, I've been driven by three deeply held forces.
Autonomy. I want to decide for myself, do things my way, be me. I always hated group projects, could spend hours in my own head on long car rides, and just wanted to be the boss of my own life.
Art and creativity. I didn't feel alive without it. Everything else felt like a chore. Making things lit me up, revealed who I was, made it all mean something. Any art class, any DIY craft at home, any bright and colorful sculpture, cool photo, abstract painting — it all fascinated me, and felt like a magic I didn't understand yet. But I knew I needed it in my life.
A love of learning. I wanted to be a marine biologist, an artist, a teacher, the girl who mops up the sweat on the basketball floor, a flight attendant, a pastry chef, a master gardener. Own a B&B. Sell seashells down by the seashore. ALL of it. My value isn't any one of those things that calls me — it's the wanting to see more, know more, feel more, all the amazing possibilities on this planet.
And as I write this, it hits home why I had to leave healthcare. I was so resentful of how it was stopping me from living all three of those values. My occupational therapy and optometry career was part of my knowledge and experience gathering, until it wasn't. I kept specializing more and more, chasing complex cases, until the tedium took over the job of actually treating patients — scheduling, paperwork, the legal battles of my injured patients, insurance limits. And I felt the possibilities for my life slipping away from me.
Build in a still point
So personally, as a way to remind myself of my values, those three forces, I'm setting up some proactive still points in my day. Eric Zimmer writes about these in How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life — small deliberate pauses that let you catch your own thinking before the day just carries you off.
Mine is going to be simple. A brief pause to check in with my top three values, and ask whether I'm doing the big and little things to live this life I chose — not the default life that chose me, as Jason Isbell put it on his album Something More Than Free.
It's not a productivity thing. It's a steering thing. Ten seconds of attention pointed at the right question, a few times a day, and you'd be amazed what stops happening by accident.
Everything connects
And don’t worry — the chores of the day still get done. They're a part of the value-driven life you choose. But now, we approach even those chores with more gratitude, because it's all connected — when the errand and the walk and the dinner and the workshop are all part of one thing we're living fully, filling up our wells so that the art we're meant to make just naturally flows from that.
Instead of trying to force it. Instead of reverse-engineering it from a statement we wrote once. Instead of living a small, default life and calling it being “practical.”
Inertia, resentment, that low simmering bitterness — none of those loosen their grip because you tried harder. They loosen when your days start to feel like they belong to you again. My three forces come together into how I want to show up in the world and make it better for all of us. And you doing your best work, in your unique way, will make it better too.
Let's go fill our wells this week with the raw material for our best art, our truest art — and we'll be living better while we do it.
With Enthusiasm for Life + Art,
Heidi
Quick Win: Take sixty seconds today and write down three things from the past month that lit you up. Don't edit. Look for the theme.
Solid Solution: Pick up How a Little Becomes a Lot by Eric Zimmer for the still point practice, or revisit Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and give her weekly Artist Date a real try — one hour, alone, doing something that fills the well.
Treat Yourself: Book the thing you keep almost booking. The workshop, the day trip, the museum an hour away. Go alone, take your notebook, and just let it all settle into your well.