Exploring Value
How do we value what we can’t see?
For the last few years, since launching my creative business, I’ve been trying to decouple my value from black and white numbers on a balance sheet. Creativity ebbs and flows….and so do the numbers, as they come and go. After years of fear and making moves from a place of inner scarcity, I realized that I may have stepped out of the corporate world of regularity, but that world never left my internal landscape. My mind is filled with questions and scripts put there by a society organized around the efficiency of a production line.
Even though my most potent work comes in focused bursts of perhaps 2 or 4 hours, maybe a day here or there with gaps between, I find measuring my value by the simplest of things:
Were you in the studio for 8 hours today?
Did you respond to that email immediately?
How many things did you create?
Counting and quantifying are key to a dream of productivity.
An image I took while dreaming of a life beyond the walls of my corporate marketing job.
A 2024 solo art show with some of my largest work to date.
I have no satisfying answer for all these questions and doubts that continually arrive to plague me:
How do you measure value without adding a price?
How do you value work that does not lead to a visible output or product?
If you are working on something we cannot see, are you even working?
On a deeper level I know that what I create comes from an open place cultivated with the seeds of time, varied influence, inner voice, thoughtful consideration, careful observation, joyful celebration – all qualities that cannot be seen with the naked eye. So then…
How do we quantify the value of time?
How do we prioritize thought versus action?
How do I justify any seeming “inaction”?
….After all, no one pays you to think.
I know beyond a doubt that so much of my work happens over time, beneath the surface. What I create is simply a tiny distillation of the immense depths of my heart. Each piece is a tiny drop from a vast ocean of thought. And yet, I still often wonder….how do I know if I’m “working”?
As I sit in a sunbeam with a cup of tea, observing the breeze in the tree across the street - am I “clocked in”?
As I feel something while reading a piece of poetry through which truth speaks - am I working?
As I think or feel or breathe or experience, is that part of my “process” of making?
If so, how do I balance all that out on a timesheet?
The lines between cells are getting blurry….
At the end of the day, bills must be paid, and I have a hard time fighting my capitalist societal training that keeps screaming the following questions at me:
How is this making you money?
How does this fit in a spreadsheet?
How do you justify the value of this?
What’s the point of “exploration”?
What’s the product you are making?
How does all this fit together or “translate”?
Shouldn’t you be more “productive”?
I have been pouring my creativity from a near empty cup for so long, it’s honestly become second nature… Only recently have I discovered how to fill that inner well back up with water - through music, deep rest, time in nature, the art of others, solitude, connection, play, novelty, discovery….. These are the building blocks of creating for me.
But even now, years along, I still struggle with seeing….that:
Great things take time.
Process, not product, is the key.
The point of exploration is just to see….who knows what’s to be found.
You can never see the view from the top when you’ve only begun to place your feet on the ground.
Trusting all of this doesn’t come easy for me. So I’m wondering….
How do you value yourself and your life?
Is it the numbers you’ve worked so hard to provide? Is it time? Is it the joy you feel inside? How do I uncouple guilt from the process? (And burn the instructions, while we’re at it?) I’m opening the floor now for your helpful suggestions….or at the very least asking the question:
