Yesterday on my afternoon run I was listening to Krista Tippett interview Rick Rubin who is a musician and a self-identified creative. Imagine going around introducing yourself as a creative. So what do you do? I’m a creative. It certainly beats all the bullshit jobs you hear about these days, like: “I synthesize data analysis to foster greater engagement among key stakeholders.” Really? And that’s how you plan to spend your one wild and precious life?

Anyway, Rick Rubin likens the creative process to fishing. You can never guarantee that you are going to catch fish, no matter how often you go fishing, but it is equally true that you will never catch fish if you don’t go fishing. And you should never think of your failure to catch fish as actual failures, but rather as eliminating a dead-end. If you fail 10 times, you have eliminated 10 dead-ends, assuming of course, and this is crucial, that you fail in a different ways.

It ties in with the documentary I watched about Stockton Rush, the guy who was hellbent to plunge a carbon-fibre submarine almost 4 kilometres into the abyss–with a crew of 5–to view the moldering wreck that is the Titanic. He kept testing the submarine and I think he built several iterations of it, but he never fundamentally changed his approach. They say he was averse to any form of criticism. Unfortunately, his creation imploded several hundred metres before they reached the Titanic. The loss of life was catastrophic but at least it was instantaneous.

So the trick is, whether you’re building submarines or learning to write, to 1) to find new ways to fail and 2) keep showing up to fish. I remember that I had a pretty good run a few years of doing “morning pages,” a method Julia Cameron came up with and wrote about in her book called The Artist’s Way. I must pick that book up again, actually. I think I could re-incorporate it into my routine spiritual practices.

Recently, I have discovered great freedom and joy in playing around with my spiritual practices. For so long, I had this humourless view of spiritual practices, that they have to look a certain way. I still do feel that there should be a daily reading of one’s sacred texts (in my case the Bible, usually one of the Psalms and sometimes one other passage), and some form of prayer. But it occurred to me that we have so much freedom in how we carry that out. For instance, I find it’s better to have short prayers but to have them more frequently, perhaps 3 or 5 times a day.

The constant stimulation available in the Digital Age has been a barrier for my creative process. We now have vast, perhaps unprecedented access to creative works, and from an unprecedented number of creators, or at least creators who are sharing their work. I suppose humans have always created, it’s just that a larger number are making it public. Now there’s so much creative work to take in that I seldom stop to try to put something out.

It’s interesting to think about the creative process as the domain of the right brain. I’m working my way through Iain McGilchrist’s book on that subject called The Master and His Emissary. Most of the advances we’re seeing in AI are in the domain of the left brain, the subservient emissary. One thing AI can’t touch is humans who create, because we’re in right brain mode. No matter how stunning AI is, it’s doing mostly or entirely left-brain tasks.

Left-brain activity can impress us, but only the more creative, right-brain activity can transform us and inspire worship. Let’s not neglect it.