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I love to journal. This week I journaled more than normal.
Not for content. Not for clarity. Not even because I had something important to say. I journaled because my mind felt cluttered, like a workshop where every surface has slowly disappeared under half-finished projects and good intentions. Writing, for me, has always worked the way tidying the studio does. You don’t necessarily solve anything. You just make space to breathe.
The last month or so has felt strange. Not bad. Not overwhelming. Just…off. This is usually my favorite time of year for rest, reset and reflection. Winter is when I slow down on purpose. Fewer obligations. More studio time. Big ideas, loose planning, a kind of quiet optimism about what the year might become. I normally thrive here. But this winter arrived carrying more weight than usual.
Christmas looked different. We’re used to twenty or more people packed into the house, noise and food and overlapping conversations. This year there were seven of us. Illness kept family away. My oldest daughter was sick. My parents were here, but not feeling great. Then my mom fell and broke her femur. That one moment set off a cascade I’m still absorbing. Hospital stays. Pneumonia with Dad. Recovery plans. The slow realization that the people who raised me are now fragile in ways they weren’t before. My parents are 89. My dad turns 90 this April. I turn 66. That arithmetic lands differently than it used to.
None of this sent me into crisis. But it did something quieter. It shifted the ground under my feet. At the same time, life kept moving forward. The heat stove went into the woodshop. The workflow is nearly dialed in for woodworking efficiently. Commission conversations are happening. The Common Ground series is close to final curation. Test prints have been pulled. I’m hunting down forty-inch film for digital negatives, which I didn’t realize would feel like searching for a rare artifact. There’s a show this weekend. Materials are being tested for silk scarves and handkerchiefs for my daughter’s wedding. The aquaponic system transitioned to hydroponics. Seeds were started. Strawberries are waiting to drop in. Garden plans are mapped. Schedules are written.
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Busy, yes. But not chaotic. Everything is, objectively, under control.
And yet.
I couldn’t quite find my footing inside it all.
I wasn’t overwhelmed. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t burnt out. I was more introspective than usual. More sensitive to small disruptions. A little less tolerant of noise, distraction, and self-neglect. I noticed that when one small routine slipped, like eating well or getting my rucks in, the effect was outsized. One missed anchor and the whole system felt slightly wobbly. That bothered me, mostly because I couldn’t name it.
Here’s where a bit of neuropsych has been helpful for me.
There’s a concept called allostatic load, which is a fancy way of describing the cumulative strain on the nervous system when stressors stack up over time without enough recovery. Not acute stress. Not emergencies. Just ongoing demand, responsibility, vigilance, concern. The kind that doesn’t shout, but hums constantly in the background.
When allostatic load rises, the brain doesn’t always respond with panic or sadness. Often it responds with subtle changes in attention and behavior. Increased introspection. A pull toward quiet. A desire to simplify. A lower tolerance for things that used to feel neutral. The nervous system isn’t failing in these moments. It’s communicating. Looking back, that landed hard for me.
The holidays were different. Family felt fragile. Time felt visible. Responsibility felt heavier. None of that stopped me from functioning, but it did increase the load I was carrying quietly. And my body and brain were doing what they’re designed to do: asking for regulation, not productivity. That distinction matters.
There’s a conversation about aging that doesn’t happen very often in creative circles, especially among working artists. Most of what we see is either denial or nostalgia. Either the insistence that nothing has changed and everything is still possible if you just hustle hard enough, or the wistful looking back at what once was. Neither feels honest to me anymore.
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What I’m noticing instead is that aging doesn’t reduce the desire to make. If anything, it sharpens it. But it changes the terms of the relationship. When I was younger, I could run on disorder for long stretches of time. Miss meals. Ignore sleep. Push through stress. Treat my body like an inconvenient delivery system for my brain. The cost was real, but delayed. I could borrow from the future and not feel the interest right away.
That margin is smaller now. Not gone. Just honest. What’s changed most is not capacity, but feedback. The body and nervous system respond faster now. They don’t wait politely while you finish the project or get through the season. They speak up sooner. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes persistently. And if you don’t listen, they eventually raise their voice. This isn’t weakness. It’s refinement.
From a neuropsych perspective, aging brings changes in how we regulate stress, attention, and recovery. The brain becomes less tolerant of chronic load, not because it’s failing, but because it’s prioritizing sustainability. Systems that once ran in the background now demand conscious care. For makers, this can feel disorienting.
We’re used to identifying ourselves by output. By resilience. By the ability to keep going when things are messy or uncertain. Many of us built our creative lives precisely because we could tolerate ambiguity and discomfort better than most. But aging quietly asks a different question.
Not “Can you push through this?”
But “Is this how you want to keep living inside your work?” That question landed for me this winter.
Watching my parents navigate fragility recalibrated something. Time felt less abstract. Health felt less guaranteed. The future felt shorter, but also more precious. And strangely, that didn’t make me want to do less. It made me want to do things with more care. Care in how I plan. Care in how I pace myself. Care in how I tend to my body and attention so the work I love doesn’t become something I survive rather than inhabit. This is where aging offers something we don’t talk about enough.
It offers discernment.
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You get better at noticing which frictions are generative and which are just noise. You’re less willing to tolerate systems that drain you unnecessarily. You start asking quieter but more consequential questions. Is this worth my energy? Does this align with how I want my days to feel? Am I building something that supports the rest of my life, or competes with it?
These aren’t questions of ambition. They’re questions of stewardship.
I’m realizing that making, at this stage of life, isn’t about proving anything. It’s about coherence. Letting the work, the body, the rhythms of daily life, and the limits of time start talking to each other instead of operating in separate compartments.
That shift doesn’t diminish creativity. It deepens it.
Which brings me back to rhythm. The nervous system doesn’t regulate through productivity. It regulates through predictable, embodied patterns. Walking. Rucking. Repetitive making. Writing without agenda. Working with the hands in ways that don’t demand outcomes. Tending plants. Being in the body long enough to remember that time still moves at a human pace.
I realized I had drifted away from some of the simplest anchors that keep me steady. Not dramatically. Just enough to matter. What surprised me most was that this wasn’t about needing rest from work. It was about needing presence within work. Slowing the tempo just enough to feel myself in my own days again.
The temptation, especially at the start of a year, is to treat every uncomfortable internal signal as a problem to solve before moving forward. But sometimes forward movement comes because you listen, not because you override.
If there’s a takeaway I’d offer you, it’s this.
Feeling off doesn’t mean something is wrong. Often it means something true is asking to be acknowledged. Not fixed. Not optimized. Acknowledged.
For me, that looks like restoring the basics. Eating like someone who wants to be well. Moving my body consistently. Returning to the studio without a performance mindset. Writing simply to clear the air. Letting planning coexist with patience.
I’m not changing course. I’m not slowing down dramatically. I’m just tightening the weave between body, attention, and making. Reclaiming rhythm. Letting the year unfold with a little more listening built into its structure.
That feels like a good way to begin.
The Studio as a System