Seasonal Commute
For me, the distance between work and life is greater than it is for most.
Many people work a job, and at the end of the day they are inserted back into their life. They go to sleep, wake up, return to work, and the cycle continues with a consistency that I have yet to acquire as an artist.
Yes, I view my art and my life practices as whole and deeply connected. But that isn't the whole picture. Work and life are also separate.
This became increasingly apparent during the creation of MONOCHROME. I was away for three weeks, working in Detroit for two of those weeks, while the other week was split between driving to Detroit and driving back to LA.
Because my time in Detroit is compressed, work there is always on an accelerated timeline. My days are filled with meetings, making things, logistics, and being present for events. My life there is fast, fun, and exhausting. And when I enter that mode, I lose a bit of my life rhythm. I don't exercise every day. I eat out more than I normally do. Living is heightened: more socializing, more drinking, more experiencing. Less sleep. More play.
But it is finite.
I go 110% in Detroit, and am practicing experiencing it without feeling guilty about losing consistency in workouts or eating as clean as I normally do. There is something freeing about knowing that the disruption has an end.
I've been back in LA for about a week now and I'm beginning to re-establish my rhythm, but I feel the time away, and it has a tailwind. The workouts are heavier. My peers are faster and I move slower. My body is softer. My capacity is lower. My strength is less than it was. My endurance needs rebuilding. I also continue to want to eat out and experience LA the way I experience Detroit during my short stays.
This carryover is hard. I'm not mad about it, but it will take some learning and effort to make these transitions smoother.
All of this can and will change. With consistent effort, I can reshape and restore what I've lost, and with intention, I can become even better physically and mentally than I was before the trip—not despite the disruption, but because I have the experience of it to learn from.
This isn't really about working out and not working out, or making art and not making art. It's about the different shapes that periods of our lives can take, what each shape provides, and the proportion of each I need to be well.
Part of the reason I resisted traveling so much was because it ensured disruption of my routine. My "perfect" wellness plan goes out the window when I travel. Or, more accurately, it has to change. Dramatically.
The same is true of my work.
When I'm in LA, my work isn't high energy. I'm not pushing 110%, staying up until 1 AM trying to finish something before getting up first thing in the morning to install it because the show opens in twelve hours.
And I think this is part of what I'm beginning to understand about the relationship between LA and Detroit.
I live and work in both places, but in very different ratios. Detroit compresses my time. LA expands it. One pushes me outward into action; the other gives me space to think, develop, and live.
Neither is more important. They simply provide something different.
The compression and expansion of time I'm beginning to see here feel like a necessary and natural relationship.
This is something I've learned from studying yoga. Opposites don't need to be qualified as good and evil. Without morality, different directions can simply be observed as compression and expansion.
All things seem to move in one direction or the other.
Even sitting still and doing nothing isn't static. Stillness moves you in a direction. For some, that stillness might be compression. For others, it might be expansion. And at different periods in our lives, stillness can change states. Most likely, it will.
I think it is common for high-achieving, highly motivated people to see stillness as a bad thing. It's lazy. It's not moving you forward. It's compression.
But compression isn't bad.
Moving inward can have benefits, just as expanding outward can.
What I'm finding is that judging my LA work activity against my Detroit work activity isn't fair on a "normal" scale. Using metrics and Instagram affirmations, Detroit produces the lion's share of my visible productivity. But the work I created in MONOCHROME was the result of two years of quiet work in LA. It's my best work to date, and it came together very rapidly in Detroit. But that was simply the labor of materializing something conceptual that required living and contemplating over a long period of time.
The best work for me is painfully slow.
It's hard for me to move slowly. I loved the 16-hour days in Detroit. I loved scrambling to get things done. There is something deeply satisfying about that kind of compression.
But most of my practice doesn't look like that.
It's the stuff that isn't a post for Instagram. It's the stuff you sit with and want to happen, but it doesn't happen when you want it to because it isn't the right time. But you keep working it, quietly, and it changes. It is shaped by time and experience, and all of a sudden, it's ready.
An opportunity arises. The window opens for it to come into this world. All it takes is a little courage. The public moment is simply where the quiet work becomes visible. I'm in a relationship with my work, and this practice lives in two places. I can't work the intense hours I love consistently, and I can't be still every day. Too much time spent doing nothing is exhausting for me. But that silence is needed for me to think. To sit with discomfort. To endure long, slow periods of planning, hoping, dreaming. Waiting for my moment to act.
I need both.
Sushi was a good example of this for me. Twelve-hour days were normal. I loved the intensity, the focus, the exhaustion, the immediate affirmation of eight hours of preparation culminating in a meal that someone would respond to in real time. The joy on their faces made the incredible effort intoxicating.
I needed to be perfect so that I could experience the feeling of bringing someone joy.
But sustaining that level of intensity wasn't possible for my mind and body. I burned out frequently, and while my body struggled, it was my mind that always collapsed before my body. Balance, for me, isn't figuring out how to merge the states of work and life into a consistent effort that produces consistent output. I want that, sure. But none of my lived experience points to that as a reality.
I think my work balance is like sushi, but maybe as a seasonal employee.
Furious activity, and time to contemplate, recover, and conceive of the next work that will require intense activity to execute.
Life, then, is the glue. It's the thing I must invest in consistently to harness this dynamic work, and shape a balance in my life where weight is skewed, not distributed equally on both sides.
MONOCHROME taught me a lot about this lived philosophy. About dynamic balance. I'm in persistent study of how to live this way, and it remains fluid. It's changing, being observed, and being modified as I learn from experience.
I'm grateful to be on this journey, and I feel so fortunate to share it.
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