All Worlds Collide: Why Connection Fuels Your Creative Work
Connection is a powerful part of the creative process. Our creative output depends on our inputs, and human connection is a huge part of that. We've lived in our town for 15 years. Slowly, imperceptibly, everything began to connect.
Last night we went to a Rotary Happy Hour social, which was held at GoggleWorks, the art center that houses my studio. I knew many people in the building that night, from different parts of my life, and it was a fun time just socializing, talking, and learning about each other.
On the way home, we stopped by a show where a friend of ours, Peter Errich, was playing. My husband met Peter in college after picking up his band's demo CD in a record store where he worked. They eventually had a class together and became friends, and Peter's band ended up playing at our wedding. Cut to 21 years later and we stop by the bar to hear him play. Then, opening for him was a fellow GoggleWorks artist, and as we enjoyed the music, we ran into friends, teachers that our kids have had…you get it. All worlds collide the longer you live somewhere.
It struck a chord though, (pun fully intended) how it's becoming easier and easier to live an isolated life, and then in contrast how very nourishing and meaningful real world connections are. Someone we previously thought of just as our child's teacher was also connected to the band of my husband's college friend!
The richness of all of us is infinite, and it benefits all of us to be tuned in…looking for common ground, learning from our differences, letting go of assumptions, and staying open and ready for how it all works together.
Let's break down how to tune into the connections in our lives, and bring them into our creative selves, drawing on the texture of these connections to deepen our creative work and get more joy out of life in the meantime!
Noticing connections…
it sounds obvious, but it wasn’t to me.
The twenty years I wasn't doing this
I think why connection seems so important to me now is that I spent a long time doing exactly the opposite.
When I worked in healthcare, I knew a lot of people — but nearly all of them lived in that one world. Patients, families, staff, colleagues, the necessary professional circles. I avoided volunteering with Rotary. I avoided the PTA. And when I did show up somewhere, I'd scan the room, find the one familiar face, and park there all evening.
Part of that was practical; my job didn't require me to network. But the truth is that after a long day of talking with patients and families and coworkers, I had nothing left. No social battery, no bandwidth. I barely had enough in the tank to show up for my own kids.
The creative cost of that only makes sense to me now. Making anything is an act of recombination — you're pulling together things you've absorbed, overheard, argued with, been surprised by — so the range of what you can make is bounded by the range of what you've taken in. And the most interesting material tends not to come from the people closest to us. A 1973 study by sociologist Mark Granovetter found that casual acquaintances were more useful than close friends in finding a new job opportunity, because your loose connections are plugged into networks that don't overlap your own. Your inner circle mostly knows what you already know. I'm noticing how much this has enriched my life more recently — the girl who opened for Peter, the teacher we keep running into, the person I talked to for ten minutes at a happy hour.
I know some of you are in that spot right now — a demanding job, a rigid schedule, a real shortage of hours. I'm not going to tell you to add something to your calendar. But if I could go back, I wouldn't change my schedule. I'd change my mindset. Open instead of closed off. Curious instead of wearing the mono-focused blinders I had on.
Presence is the way in
So how do you get there with no extra time and no extra energy? I think the starting point is presence. Not a program or a commitment — just being fully in your body, in the moment you're actually in, open to what it has to offer. A few breaths before you walk into the room. Setting down the preconceived notions you brought with you. Enjoying where you are instead of mentally rehearsing what comes next.
And this isn't only a nice idea; it puts your brain in a state of readiness. Attention is selective by necessity — you can't process everything coming at you, so what makes it through the filter is largely what you've primed yourself to look for. It's the frequency illusion: the minute you decide you want a certain car, you can't stop noticing them everywhere. The cars were always there. You just weren't tuned to that channel. People work the same way.
Tuning in
Look for common ground. Usually smaller than you expect — a favorite band, your kid's baseball team, a shared irritation about parking. You don't need much in common to start a real conversation. You just need one thread.
Learn from the differences. Once you're past small talk, the interesting part is where you diverge. Ask one more question than you normally would. When someone tells you what they do, ask what they actually like about it. Everyone is interesting when you get past the basics and into their real stories.
Let go of assumptions. We assign people a category fast — that's my kid's teacher, that's the guy at the front desk — and then stop updating. Almost every time I've been surprised by a person, it's because I'd quietly decided who they were years ago and never checked.
Stay open and ready. Go to the thing you'd normally skip. Say yes to the opening act. You can't schedule the good ones.
None of this is efficient, and I think that's the point. Connection accumulates, and then one day you look up and realize your whole life is quietly braided together, and there is a new depth and joy underneath it all. And there’s no pressure to plan it, because you can’t anyway!
Bringing it into the work
The step people skip is where all of this actually reaches the work. It's easy to have a great evening and then go into the studio Monday and make exactly what you were already making.
So write down what stuck, before it evaporates. I use my Bullet Journal for this, or the Notes app on my phone if I'm out and about. Not a plan — just a line about whatever caught me.
A recent one: I was at an exhibit here at GoggleWorks, completely mesmerized by how the artist was using colored pencil, and I got to ask her about her process right there at the opening while also talking through the work with my friends. Somewhere in that conversation it came back to me — my first set of "real" artist's colored pencils, which I still have, in a box that's falling apart at this point. So now I'm sketching with them again. I have no idea yet what this nostalgic medium will do to my work, and I’m excited to find out.
The influence rarely arrives announcing itself. It shows up months later as a color you're drawn to, or a box of pencils you haven't opened in twenty years.
The part that doesn't run out
Connection isn't a resource you deplete. Every person you pass is carrying an entire interior world, and any one of them could hand you the thing that changes how you work. Most of it goes untouched simply because we didn't ask the second question.
Go to the thing this week. Stay a little longer than you meant to. It might make someone else’s day, as well as your own.
With Enthusiasm for Life + Art,