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On the creative journey it's easy to get lost but don't worry you'll lift up sometimes you just need a creative pet talk.

Hey you're listening to the creative pet talk podcast. I'm your host, Amy J. Pizza. I have been thinking a lot lately about the journey and the destination, that kind of trope.

I realized that early in my creative practice I got really goal oriented and it was super powerful. I still am a big believer in goals and intentions and the clarity of that.

I think it's important especially for people like me who are divergent thinkers who have a hard time making decisions have an easy time coming up with options.

I think goals are really really powerful and I think they always will be for me. But recently I have been reminding myself that the only reason that I ever had any goals was as a way to clarify my efforts so that I knew if I achieved that goal I would be closer to spending my life and my time in the kind of creative energy that I wanted to do.

When I had a goal of I want to make an illustration for the New York Times it wasn't about making the illustration for the New York Times and when I got to that goal it didn't make any of the stuff I was doing better.

The journey literally was the point where I wanted to be making that kind of illustration that goal was clarifying to how I wanted to be spending my time and then once I was able to do that and achieve that it told me like you're doing it.

So you're doing what you want to do but it's easy when you get going oriented to forget that the reason you're doing that is the life that you want to have not the destination not the day where you achieve it but the time leading up to it how you want to spend your life and the time after that.

So it's everything before and after and not really the thing that you reach and I've been in a process both with my wife Sophie and episode 400 we talked a lot about the anti goal of you know what we're not going to do what how we don't want to focus our energy and give ourselves freedom to explore for the sake of creating.

I feel personally like I'm in a season like that and I have a sense that a lot of other people are feeling that feeling of let's get back to why we make what we make both in join the process expressing ourselves the infinite game of coming up with new stuff like I feel like we all are a lot of us are feeling the need to ground ourselves in the reason we're doing this.

At a time when you know AI is doing what it's doing in the creative space and the world is just been such a chaotic place in the economies in a chaotic state I feel like it's a great time to regroup and rethink and remember why we make what we make.

And so I'm really excited to have Eric Zimmer of the one you feed podcast on this episode because he has done an enormous amount of work in the spiritual space and his podcast the one you feed is is a really massive podcast amazing guest like Pete Holmes and Deepak Chopra and Susan Kane and a bunch of people that we talked about on the show even but I love how he postures himself within the space.

And I think that's a really great experience for me to be able to do this in a spiritual space because for me I'm not here to judge how you think about spirituality or whether you don't think about it or you reject it whatever it does that's not really a concern of mine for me personally I've kind of accepted that spirituality is at the very least a sort of right brained way of conceptualizing our internal world and how it relates to the grandness of the oneness that we're going to be able to do.

The universe in the most you know material at the very least in the most materialistic sort of way that it's a way that we can conceptualize this so that we can engage in stuff that is very important for our psyche our mental health are well being and then I'm even more than open to beyond that but at the very least I feel like I can co-sign that and I feel like Eric does a tremendous job at.

Showing up to that space in that whole self sort of way through the lens of spirituality we haven't talked a lot about spirituality on the show I think there is an essence of spirituality in the show throughout however we haven't hit it head on because I think it can be really dicey territory it can be divisive it can be messy there's a whole bunch of reasons why I've mostly avoided it.

But I was really pumped to bring on someone who I think has very responsibly engaged in that space in a way that's really powerful and helpful and I wanted to get his expertise and bring some of that attentiveness to the journey and to the process and using creativity and approaching it with sort of a meditative state and so I hope that this episode encourages you to remember.

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