Bradley Spitzer worked at HCA when I did and had a chance meeting on a project. We discovered we both loved photography and swapped social media. I follow him on Substack and he recently had a series that struck a chord with me. So, I'm sharing a some items with a photograph from me.

https://bradleyspitzer.substack.com/archive?sort=new

The trap, when you’re dimmed, is believing the way out has to be big. Ginormous.

A book. A business. A career pivot. A reinvention with a launch date and a logo.

Don’t.

Big projects are mostly a way to stay stuck. They require resources you don’t have, conditions that will never arrive, and courage you’re trying to borrow from the future. They let you feel ambitious without requiring you to actually make anything today. Honestly, it gives you permission to hide.

Small things don’t let you off the hook.

A cyanotype takes an afternoon. A letter takes twenty minutes. A photograph takes one honest look. You can make a small thing, right now, with the attention and materials you already have.

And here is the secret the big-project people never tell you:

The small thing is not practice for the big thing. The small thing is the thing.

The maker in you isn’t starved for a platform. It’s starved for use. It needs to be exercised. The hands need to know they still work. The eye needs to know it still sees. The voice needs to know it still sounds like yours.

One letter. One photograph. One drawing. One honest sentence. One meal from scratch. One fixed thing that was broken.

Make it this week. Not for an audience. Not for a platform. For the part of you that has forgotten it can.

You are not going to feel alive by thinking about aliveness. You are going to feel alive by moving your hands.

So move them.

Who You're Near

On proximity, energy, and the rooms that make you larger.

Bradley Spitzer

Aliveness is contagious. And so is dimness.

This is the rule nobody wants to say out loud because it implicates the people we love, the people we work with, the rooms we’ve sat in for years.

I host a Saturday morning call typically once a month. Creative people, sometimes strangers to each other, show up on a Zoom screen together. We talk for an hour. With no agenda.

The first time I hosted it, I thought I was providing something. I thought I was the host, they were the guests, and I was giving them a space.

I was wrong about that too.

What I learned - slowly, over many Saturdays - is that I need that room more than they do. Or at least as much. Because the rest of the week I am surrounded, mostly, by people who operate in the register of output. Deliverables. Deadlines. Performance. The Saturday room operates in a different register. People come in tired and leave less tired. They come in dimmed and leave a little brighter. And so do I.

There’s a question worth asking yourself that most people avoid:

Who am I near, and what does it do to me?

Not who you love. Not who you owe. Not who you’ve known the longest. Who are you near - in proximity, by habit, by default - and what is their energy doing to yours?

Some of the people you love are also the people that are dimming you. This is a real and hard thing. I’m not asking you to leave them. I’m asking you to notice, honestly, which rooms make you smaller and which rooms make you larger, and to make sure you are not spending all your hours in the first kind.

The move this week: find one person whose presence reliably lights you up, and put real time with them on the calendar. Not a coffee “sometime soon.” An actual hour.

Aliveness needs witnesses. Alone is not how we do this.

Fallow Is Not Failure

On rest as preparation, not reward.

This one I almost didn’t write because it’s the one I’m still learning.

For most of my life, I believed rest was what I earned after the work. A reward. A weekend. A vacation.

I was wrong.

Last month I went to Asheville. Five hours from home with a camera, a notebook, and a loose plan. I didn’t go to figure it out. I went to stop trying. To rest. To turn down the volume.

There’s a framework I’ve been sitting with - the artist Joel Uili’s seven creative phases: Discovery, Inspiration, Creation, Spreading, Reception, Integration, Rest/Fallow.

Most of us are told, implicitly or explicitly, that only three of those count: Creation, Spreading, Reception. The rest are invisible. And suspect.

But farmers know. You cannot plant the same field every year and expect the soil to keep giving. The fallow season is not the absence of work. It is the unseen half of the work. The part that makes the next harvest possible.

If you are dimmed, there is a real chance you are not broken.

You might be empty.

And the worst thing you can do in an empty, fallow season is force a harvest.

This is hard to accept in a culture that measures you weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. The pressure to produce, to post, to ship, to stay visible, to stay relevant - that pressure doesn’t pause for your soul’s need for silence.

If you wait for permission to rest, you will never get it.

So here’s the permission, from me to you:

Some seasons are for making. Some seasons are for letting the field go quiet. You are allowed to be in one or the other. You are not allowed to be in both at once, no matter what everyone else tells you.

Rest is not what you earn. Rest is what prepares you. It’s what makes the next round of work worth doing.

If this week is a fallow week, honor it. The field is not empty. It’s gathering.