Why it's risky to be a creative without a morning routine

The best portraitist will know you better than you know yourself and show that self in the painting she is producing, the best photographer will show the true character of whoever he is portraying and so will the musician and the actor. But while empathy is indispensable when connecting with others, when do we know we have overstepped the line and subconsciously assimilated some small, unnoticeable part of the person we were connecting with. As the famous quote from the bible goes: [...] love your enemies [...]. But what if you end up in love with them?

The best actors have strong regimes of habits that they stick to, because after spending a year or more on a set, playing a masked villain who generally despises all living creatures, they need to shake of the fictional persona they had crated and step back into their real life. If that real life isn't something concrete, something with at least a semi-functioning schedule and some routines, they're in for some trouble. Because how can you know who you are if "you" isn't defined by anything you do on a daily basis except for eating and sleeping. And this doesn't only apply to actors, what about the extraordinary portraits who comes to your home and can paint a portrait of you so vividly that it looks more real, more genuine, then you do in person (because you wear a social mask 80% of the time, but she sees directly through the charade into your real self, the one who's maybe a bit sad but full of hope). But to have such a gift, to be so strongly empathic, one pays a price. We can quickly adapt parts of behaviours that we like in others, small bits and pieces of other people's characteristics that intrigue us and delight us. And we can also quickly learn to do what others do, and sometimes not for our own good. I know many people who had (and still very much do) the greatest hearts I have ever seen, but mistreatments and emotional rollercoasters dented them into bitter or lost souls. And while not having a strong morning routine was absolutely not the cause of their pain, having build reliable habits on which to rely when constantly facing new environments and people would surely have helped. If you go running every morning, you will find that you eat healthier because of it, and you may even stop smoking because of both (if you do smoke) and after stopping smoking you may just start doing other things you have been pushing aside all these years, maybe because of merely telling yourself: "If I can stop that one thing, I know I will be able to do everything else." The only problem being, you picked the hardest one to stop and never succeeded. And this goes both ways, you don't start eating junk food everyday by having one hamburger, and you surely don't start smoking by having one cigarette. And if such minor things can have lasting impacts on our lives, surely being in contact with other activities and ideas can too. The only thing we can do to be prepared for such events is to build strong habits around our life. Because the more empathic you are, the more susceptible you can be to the emotions others send your way. And we all need at least a functional foundation to stand upon and say: "This is me, not all of me, but the part of me that needs to exist, so I don't spend my living days on a couch smoking weed and ordering pizza." Because that's the same part that says: "Nope, this is not something I like and I will not do it regardless of peer pressure or how much the media wants me to be doing it."

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://survivingart.com/2018/12/09/why-its-risky-to-be-a-creative-without-a-morning-routine/

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