Creativity loves uncertainty

And you should, too

Your Five-Year Plan is a newsletter about embracing life’s profound uncertainty.

Maybe your own plans went up in flames; maybe you’re considering a big, scary leap. This is your trusty companion while you’re writing the next life chapter.

Welcome to the conversation—and to the adventure that unfolds when your plans go sideways. This is letter #22. ✨

☀️ How was your week?

The shores of Evergreen Lake

I spent last weekend in the Colorado Rockies with three of my oldest friends. Trails were traversed; Avery Brewing IPAs and Reese’s peanut butter cup s’mores were consumed; newly-purchased crystals were anointed in the waters of Evergreen Lake. (Non-rhetorical question: is that what you do with crystals?)

It was a whirlwind 48 hours during which nobody quite acclimated to life above 7,000 feet—and it was absolute perfection.

On to today’s letter!

Creativity loves uncertainty

Trail marker near Vail, captured on Kodak film

On the morning of my mom’s burial, eight days after my layoff, I arrive at a candle-making class not even remotely ready to channel my creativity.

But two of my favorite people have invited me to Edgewater Candles, and I want to be with them on my last day in Chicago. So I show up, prepared to go through the motions, knowing that’s all they’ll expect me to do.

The three of us slip through the front door on Bryn Mawr Avenue as the clock strikes ten. The lights are dim, and ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” plays softly over the speakers. We receive a warm welcome from Mark, the shop’s co-owner, who greets us like old friends.

After a candle science primer, our custom scent selection, and a dash of soy-wax mixology, our DIY candles sit on the communal wooden table, cooling down and firming up. Each member of our little group takes a seat, markers in hand, adorning adhesive candle labels as Mark answers our (ahem) burning questions.

My candle babies

Mark and his husband began making candles as a hobby in 2016; over time, that hobby became a successful business.

Fresh off my layoff, completely unsure about my life’s trajectory, I ask Mark how they’d gotten comfortable enough to make each successive leap of faith: from newbies to sidewalk sale participants to renters of commercial production space to brick-and-mortar shopkeepers.

Mark’s eyes crinkle behind his glasses, and he pushes back a lock of his shoulder-length hair.

“Well,” he begins, “I just stabbed my comfort zone in the heart. Repeatedly.”

The negative side of uncertainty—where “not knowing” is synonymous with “anxiety about the future”—is the most oft-discussed one.

When we’re fixated on avoiding worst-case scenarios, we seek to banish all possible sources of uncertainty. The overplanning tendency stems directly from this impulse.

We attach ourselves to jobs, relationships, and life choices that offer the illusion of stability (somehow forgetting that no foundation is less stable than one built on fear).

But here’s what we forget: there’s a positive side of uncertainty, too.

Once our basic needs are met—food, clothing, shelter and the like—not knowing doesn’t have to elicit anxiety. It can elicit hope, experimentation, curiosity, and innovation. Because “not knowing” is also synonymous with “possibility.”

Creating something new, something that didn’t exist before, is an act of exploration. It’s a celebration of possibility.

And for that reason, creativity absolutely loves uncertainty.

Even the most certainty-obsessed film photographers—those who, like me, strive to capture their subjects with representational accuracy—are ultimately at the whim of uncertainty.

Until your film is developed and scanned, you can’t know if the scene will materialize as predicted. So even careful, meticulous film aficionados learn to embrace the joy of waiting and wondering.

But experimental film photographers like Cami Turpin take the inherent uncertainty of film and lean directly into it. Their creative process involves intentionally dialing up the uncertainty, turning away from anxiety and toward possibility.

As Cami says, “I don’t think fear is, in any way, helpful in the creative process.”

She experiments with cross-processing her film (developing it in the “wrong” chemicals), using cameras that leak light, exposing both sides of her film, soaking exposed rolls in various liquid “film soup” concoctions before development, splicing multiple negatives together, and shooting double exposures on a single negative.

The results are stunning.

Spliced negatives by Cami Turpin

Holga light leaks by Cami Turpin

Blind double-exposure by Cami Turpin

In dialing up the uncertainty, she dials up the mystery and anticipation that characterize the creative process, and the surprise and discovery that characterize its outcome.

In this interview, Cami exudes security even as she talks about techniques that require her to give up control. Why? Not only is embracing unpredictability key to her work’s originality, it’s also just plain fun.

So creativity loves uncertainty; that much is clear.

In the book I can’t stop talking about, Bruce Feiler takes this argument one step further. When it comes to the natural systems we’re part of, uncertainty is creativity.

“Chaos is nature’s creativity in the face of constant change,” he says, explaining:

The essence of chaos is self-organizing. It’s what a river current does when it eddies around a boulder and then reforms; it’s what a flock of birds does when it takes off from a tree and then glides into formation; it’s what a weather system does when it collides into a different system, merges, and then keeps moving; the same with sand dunes, snow squalls, clouds.

Chaos is the transition state between something old and something new, which makes it the ultimate creative act.

Remember that as you embark—however messily—on any path that involves stabbing your comfort zone in the heart (repeatedly), as you learn to shed the anxiety of uncertainty and, instead, begin to embrace its intimate ties to possibility, creativity, and personal growth.

💬 What do you think?

I’m curious to hear from you. What’s your relationship to creativity during times of uncertainty?

Had your own plan-in-flames experience? Taking a leap into the unknown? I’d love to hear more. Just hit “reply” to get in touch, or introduce yourself here.

Warmly,
Maddie