Wow. What a title.

No pressure there.

I was sitting on the train this morning, thinking about a conversation I recently had with a friend.

We were discussing all the balls we have in the air, juggling our creative lives, including the desire for creative lives, and our workaday lives, and it came to me (as it sometimes does) that we spend a lot of time alone trying to find that fabled, hallowed work life balance, and as creatives, with things popping in the hopper of our minds at all hours, you can find yourself having profoundly moving thoughts and making impactful decisions in the silence of your mind.

Sometimes that silence is all consuming and the muck being slung in our minds gums up the gears.

This is when I turn to my creative friends.

To be honest, it’s a conversation I have often – with this friend and others – about how our creative lives are going, and more specifically, what stumbling blocks are we encountering that may be hindering our progress.

It is a very important conversation to have. It helps put things in context with regard to my life. My whole life, the 9 to 5, family, spouse, friends, writing, recording, events, and down time.

I sometimes forget that my life isn’t easily compartmentalized into neat little boxes that can be taken from the shelf, one at a time, and given my full attention and focus.

I have these conversations because they help me clear the clutter, so I can focus on what matters. They help with introspection, because, as writing is an inherently solitary exercise, I spend a lot of time in my head.

Getting out of my head and talking to my other creative friends is an important part of managing my well being.

I say this often, and I mean it every single time. I love my friends. They are my support system and my creative friends are uniquely positioned to support me in ways that others simply cannot.

That is not meant to diminish the value I place on others in my life, as those friends and family members are so very important to me.

I appreciate the time people in my life take to help bring my feet back to solid ground, to give a well timed lecture on passion and focus, and to pump me up if I may be feeling down. They help me put one foot in front of the other when I can’t see a path forward, and for that I am so very grateful.

While we all work through our own profound silence, I am glad you know that we are not truly alone.

Now, let me take advantage of some of this silence and get to creating something.

And before I get too hung up on whether that thing I create could possibly qualify as profound or not, let me remind myself that penning a new idea is brave, inventive, and wonderful, and frankly, that’s good enough for me. “Profound” can be a happy accident.

One final note to myself, and possibly to you, I might just use that title elsewhere. It’s just that good!