A Way to Be in the World
“You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.”
- Annie Dillard in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
We often think of creativity as something we do. We paint, write, or design. But there's a deeper creativity in how we live our lives. Counterintuitively (for me, anyway), it’s less doing and more being. Less chasing and more allowing. I'm learning to move through the world in a way that values presence over productivity, meaning over metrics.
It’s terribly hard.
From certainty to seeking
Like many, I grew up with traditional frameworks for understanding my place in the world. The structure of organized religion (first Evangelical, then Baptist) offered me valuable tools for practicing presence, ritual, and meaning-making. Daily prayer forced reflection on what happened, to whom, and how. Events were deciphered as part of my life’s larger narrative called “God’s plan.” And predetermined ceremonies marked transitions throughout the year.
Perhaps what kept me tethered to organized religion for so long — what keeps many of us there — was the comfort of certainty. When you believe in God's plan, everything has meaning; every experience points toward a divine purpose. The question isn't whether there's a way to live but simply how to discern and follow the path already laid out by someone who knows best.
In 1993, as a sophomore in college, I read Annie Dillard's book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” It showed me a different way to live by cultivating presence and meaning in my life with equal intentionality, less dogmatism. It made asking questions exciting, not scary. Thirty-two years and hundreds of books later, I still enjoy asking, "How should I live?"
It's a very, very old question. Let’s review:
Heraclitus pondered it by the rivers of ancient Greece.
Rumi explored it through poetry in the 13th century.
Montaigne invented the essay to examine it in the 1500s.
Henry David Thoreau took to the woods of Massachusetts in 1845 to “live deliberately” and find his own answer.
Annie Dillard would continue the trend along Virginia's Tinker Creek in the 1970s, inspired by Thoreau's example more than a century later.
So far, my answer isn't a destination but a practice: learning to be receptive to what's actually in front of me. I'm learning to cultivate a contentment and freedom that come with being fully present to life as it unfolds. This approach asks me to choose simplicity and emptiness over the security of (often someone else’s) predetermined meaning. In this way of being, there are no external measures of success — only the quiet knowing that comes from being fully awake to my life.
My copy of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
It’s not the original, which is too bad. But it, too, has been read several times.
Learning to be receptive
Over the last decade, I’ve been increasingly drawn to a life of creativity — though that word feels both too modern and too narrow for what I mean. It’s closer to what Dillard describes as a state of receptiveness to the present: not chasing after meaning but waiting, alert and empty-handed, ready to be filled. And then creating.
In "The Creative Act: A Way of Being," Rick Rubin also argues that creativity requires us to be empty and patient. As an "antenna for creative thought," we pick up the signal by not looking for it.
“Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum. Drawing down the ideas that the universe is making available.”
This emptying and receptiveness aren’t just about creativity; they're about life itself. For me, it means letting go of old narratives and patterns.
Presence, ritual, and meaning
There are three elements of religion that I miss most: presence, ritual, and meaning.
As Dillard wrote, “Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” In Walden, Thoreau understood the rarity of true presence, which he equated with being awake:
“To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.”
Complete awakeness might be impossible, but I find moments of it when painting or writing. Time dissolves. I look up shocked that hours have passed. In those moments, I'm not searching for meaning—I'm just fully here.
Ritual happens in the ordinary: mixing paints, cleaning brushes until the water runs clear, the creak of my studio chair. Even choosing to make pour-over coffee, which requires that I watch it happen. These small repeated actions mark the rhythm of my days.
And meaning isn't handed down anymore. It emerges — in the work, in conversations with people who respond to it, and sometimes in patterns I only notice when looking back.
The paradox of emptiness
Living this way often requires subtraction rather than addition. To create, I have to let go of what blocks my ability to be present. That may be overthinking, over-planning, or the distractions I use to avoid sitting with myself (even a good book!).
The writers I mention above point me toward this same path. Rumi taught that we must empty ourselves to become vessels for creativity and love; in his poem “The Song of the Reed,” he described the soul as a flute that must be hollow to make music. Montaigne found fulfillment only after leaving public life for his library tower, where wisdom emerged through ruthless self-examination rather than external validation.
What remains after emptying — if we can do it — is paradoxically fuller, simpler, and clearer. The practice isn't easy, but in releasing my grip on certainty, I create space for meaning to emerge. And that, perhaps, is where this practice begins.