These days, trying to make anything meaningful can feel like facing into a relentless headwind that’s blasting through every crack in your life.

If you’re despairing right now, thank you for paying attention.

If you’re also trying to create—make art, build a business, publish a book, paint a picture, parent a child, compose or design anything with consciousness—you might be doubting whether there’s any point.

It can feel like you’re cupping a candle flame in your hands, while the internet, the news, the struggles of family and friends, the prospect of AI, buffet through your house, and your nervous system, threatening to blow out everything that matters.

Being told to ‘stay positive,’ to ‘be mindful’ or to ‘go creative’ can feel almost offensively inadequate.

Yet this is the job.

Creativists know that we have two hands and we must use them to hold two things at once.

In one hand, the suffering in the world and in ourselves; in the other, the quiet, courageous, calm that is also there, within and without.

Once we’re in the right state to see it and feel it.

The creative way is not denial or detachment, it’s containment.

Creating a shelter, first, for ourselves, so we can process what’s happening, and find a way to keep on loving what we do, and doing what we love.

Then, and only then, to act for others.

Our work is not to fix everything, not to carry the whole world on overladen shoulders, not to feed the imaginings of storm-tossed minds—but to protect what needs to be protected, so we can carry on creating with heart and soul engaged and present.

To do what we need to do to contain our fire and keep it aflame.