Stop press: creative person lives long and happy life

Easter. Blue skies over Sydney, kids playing in the yellow sunlight of a magical Pittwater afternoon ...Friends, I see people. Lots of them. People of all ages — out on the water in ANYTHING that floats, from banged up tinnies to luxury craft; out on their deck or in their gardens. Sharing news, gossip, plant cuttings, recipes, books (up here, when you're stuck for a book you just help yourself from one of the many libraries of pre-loved treasures left for the taking on the public warves). People making the best of an extraordinary place.And I'm reminded of a fact that someone told me once: I'm perched on an island that has a higher-than-just-about-anywhere concentration of people in the media and arts. If my host's neighbours are a sample, the gossip is right. Filmmakers, animators, artists, musicians, screenwriters, publishers, publicists, writers: the place is simply AWASH with them. Up here, creative people are quite ordinary. They get up and go to work, like everyone else. They run successful businesses, they have good times and bad. They buy posh beer when it's on special and bogan beer when it's not. They pay taxes and worry about their kids' schooling; and the quality of life of the chicken they bought at the supermarket; and the state of democracy; and whether or not they're living the life they thought they would. In the midst of all this ordinary bustle, creative folks are probably the NORM.What? Some-one roll out the fire hoses. Things could get ugly. We might need to spray some crazy dudes down.Because aren't creative people DANGEROUS? Aren't they all tormented geniuses (or genii?). And doesn't being a tormented genius equal a tormented life of drugs and booze and smudged mascara and hedonism and depression? Amy Winehouse. Yup, definitely. Kurt Cobain. You get it. Creativity equals messing up plus drugs equals addiction which equals DEATH.That's right people: in short, being creative equals death. Sound the big drums folks and bring out your dabblers, scribblers, twiddlers and fiddlers. All of your artsy-fartsy folk, in fact.But lay on the brakes! Up here, as far as I can tell, creativity doesn't equal death. Look, here come those neighbours I mentioned. Definitely not dead.Now, you can see that I'm working up to an ARGUMENT here, so at this point I need to make three important qualifying statements.First, this island is NOT THE WORLD.  As a sample population, it sucks: the community here is not a representative one, in terms of peoples' race, ethnicity, social agency and financial position. I see a lot of middle class white people here (although I happen to know that's not the whole story ...). But the point should be made: a diverse community this is not.Second, some creative lives do go bad. Sure they do. Any kind of life can take unexpected turns, and it's easier than you think to wind up in Sucksville. Winehouse and Cobain show us that's true for creatives too.Third, if being crazy helps you create, then rock on. Read no further and don't let this rant put you off your stride. Be NUTS as a Snickers if it works for you ...But here I am, in a place where creative people thrive and it causes me to think hard about the assumptions, labels and stereotypes that can build a toxic template for creative lives.  Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of Eat, Pray, Love nails this point it in her TED talk about the myth of the creative genius.Why, she says, does popular wisdom insist that having a creative life destines one for doom? Why must all creative people huddle in the shade of the monolithic cultural story that says artistry emerges from a fissure — that to do good creative work requires us to be broken, damaged or unstable?Now, it's time for another confession: Philip Seymour-Hoffman's death got me started me on this tip. That was a few months ago so I've had time to think on this a bit. When he died, we witnessed a sincere outpouring of sadness at his death. And rightly so: he was much admired. Yet alongside the genuine and inflected dedications from his colleagues and friends, I detected a less-than-savoury side to the media reports — the gleeful recounting of the salacious facts, such as the quantity of drugs in his apartment, the needle still in the dead man's arm. Reports quickly consolidated into a single, HOMOGENISED PICTURE: of a 'lonely broken genius who lost his battle with addiction'.No-one is interested in lazy cliches, friends. But we hear them a lot. So let's blow one cliche to pieces right now: creative folk CAN and DO live stable, happy, productive lives. Boring, effective lives. Pedestrian lives. Wrestling demons takes up a lot of time — time we creators could better spend, er, creating. And let's look at this cliche from another angle: are creative folk the only types of people who hit the skids? Of course not. Many of us, whatever our gifts — accountancy, banking, real estate, surgery, dentistry — will experience a dark tea-time of the soul. Let's not pretend for a SECOND that creative people are special in that way.I think having a creative job asks special things of artists. Sure it does. Be open, be observant. Inquire, probe, question. Try to FEEL an experience from someone else's' point of view. I could go on.Of course, our IDEAS can be dangerous. Our work can make people crazy. We can turn the world upside down with the power of our art. But we don't have to live up to some crazy-arse artist myth to produce our work, RIGHT?I reckon that the ORDINARY things that help anyone perform their jobs well — from accountant to athlete to farmer — apply for artists. Here comes the boring stuff: if you're not eating well, you'll stuff up. If you're not looking after yourself, you'll hit the skids after a while. Sleep if you want to stay sane. Artists and writers, boring is the new black. Set your alarm, get up and and get on with work. That sounds a bit like normal life to me.So here endeth the spill. How did I get from boats on Pittwater to death and back again? Your guess is as good as mine, hombre. But I know two things for sure: we CAN question representations of people every time we catch a whiff of lazy story-making. Artist, writers and all creative workers, let's debate the truth of noxious life-limiting NARRATIVES until we've replaced the crap old ones with a useful set of stories to describe ourselves.Or better still, let's not bother: let's make art instead. Let's live and create. Let's get old. Let's go on and on and on. Let's live like we're trying to bore the pants off ourselves and simultaneously churn out some proper MARVELLOUS, DANGEROUS, CRAZY work. Join me in my quest to inspire a new snappy headline:'Person (who happened to make a whole lot of arty stuff) dies peacefully in own bed at age 99'.