#BeWild: Don’t Be Nice

#BeWild is a weekly roundup of thought-provoking, sometimes “out-there” content to help/inspire/motivate you to tap into your wild, get a little lost, find your path. 

I’ve recently been trying to find more creative time in my life. Instead of trying to fit writing in at odd free times, I now start every day with it (and coffee).

And then, I came across this little infographic that details how a handful of famous creative people spend (or spent) their days. Surprisingly, most get a good night sleep and spend a significant portion of their day doing creative work, eating and being leisurely. This makes sense. If you want to do creative work, you need to do creative work. And creativity needs space to breathe. Maybe one day my days will look like this, but until then, I’ll take the mornings.

Chances are that if you’ve seen the movie or read the book, Wild has cause you to ask yourself if you could do something like Cheryl Strayed did—hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The answer: YES. But maybe you don’t need to get as extreme. Use these eight women as inspiration.

Ah, the nice girl. The girl who is uncontroversial and avoids conflict at all cost, who aims to please everyone. We’ve all been her at some point or another. But no longer. I will be forever kind and generous, but not nice. And my first step to “nice girl” recovery is adopting one (of six) anti-nice girls resolutions: “I will not rush to use up less time and space.”

And lastly, I’m not even sure where to start with this one. Let’s try an excerpt:

The more we do, the more passive we seem to become. Compliant. Complaisant. As if we are merely going through the motions.

Why? We are something like apparitions today; juggling a multiplicity of selves through the noise; the “you” you are on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Tinder…wherever…at your day job, your night job, your hobby, your primary relationship, your friend-with-benefits, your incredibly astonishing range of extracurricular activities. But this hyperfragmentation of self gives rise to a kind of schizophrenia; conflicts, dissocations, tensions, dislocations, anxieties, paranoias, delusions. Our social wombs do not give birth to our true selves; the selves explosive with capability, possibility, wonder.

Intrigued? Read Umair Haque’s “The Bullshit Machine.” It will twist your brain, in a good way.

 

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