By Jennifer Fulwiler
Your blue flame is your unique way to give back to others. It’s a passion that has been instilled in you that makes the world a better place when you use it. But what happens when you’re interrupted while doing the work you are meant to do?
One of the reasons we tend to want to isolate ourselves when we use our blue flames is because we’re afraid of being interrupted. As someone who tends to get hyperfocused on my work and is silently screaming any time I am distracted from it, I’ve struggled with this a lot, especially as a parent. How can I embrace the chaos that’s a normal part of my life without letting it derail the work I’m meant to do? I learned a lot about this in a surprising place: a Benedictine monastery in Oregon.
A few years ago I went to Mount Angel Abbey to visit a relative of mine, Brother Claude Lane, who’s a monk there. He’s a talented iconographer, and to see one of his vivid pieces is to know without a doubt that this is his blue flame. Icons have traditionally been understood to teach, in addition to being works of art, in part because this art form developed when most people were illiterate. In fact, icons are said to be written rather than painted. When you see one of Brother Claude’s icons, you get it. Your eyes follow the forms of the figures, as intended, to encounter elements rich with symbolism. (Do an image search for a Madonna and Child icon, and notice how all the lines elegantly point to the Christ child.)
I always assumed that he got to do whatever he wanted, all day, every day. I was a little jealous when I compared how often my attempts to do my own work got derailed. Then I visited him, and my whole perspective changed.
When you walk into Brother Claude’s studio, it has all the telltale signs of an artist at work: brushes scattered across tabletops, rolled-up tubes of paint, sketches stacked next to books about painting and iconography. The window at the end of the room looks out over the Cascade mountain range, with Mount Hood just out of view. The monks at his abbey gather to pray six times a day. When the bells of the grand church echo through Brother Claude’s studio to announce prayer time, he has to stop what he’s doing and go. It doesn’t matter if Brother Claude was right in the middle of something or just had his best idea ever. When the bells ring, he must set down his brushes.
Guests are invited to join the monks at their prayers, and I decided to take them up on it. I lived like they did for a week. I also happened to be working on my first book, and this experience transformed the way I handle interruptions when I’m using my blue flame.
Make Your Interruptions as Predictable as Possible
Sometimes I hear mothers analogize the interruptions in their lives to the interruptions in monks’ lives. Just like a monk is interrupted by the prayer bells, I’m interrupted by the baby crying, the thinking goes. The big difference is that the prayer bells are predictable. When I’m in the middle of writing a comedy set and I’m caught off guard by the kids having a screaming fight over a toy, let’s just say my reaction is not very monklike.
As a person living in the ’burbs, not a hilltop abbey, I’ll never be able to get my interruptions as neatly scheduled as those of a monk, but it helps to do as much as I can to make them routine. After my trip to Mount Angel, I guarded my time to do my blue-flame work more carefully. When someone texted and asked if I could chat or a kid wanted a snack, I’d reply that I was happy to help—when I was finished.
Let Your Interruptions Reshuffle Your Ideas
Every time I heard those prayer bells through my open window at the guest house, it seemed I was on the brink of some amazing insight. I was convinced that this was the only creative inspiration I’d ever have, that it was all ruined by this interruption, and now I might as well not even have a blue flame because all my inspiration was ruined by this stupid prayer time. (Now you see why God did not give me a blue flame for ministry.)
Yet every single time I returned to my work, I found that my idea wasn’t nearly as great as I’d imagined it was. Breaking myself out of my rut and immersing myself in the new sights and sounds and smells of the church triggered a reshuffling of my brain. All the thoughts that had been swirling in my head were now cleaned up and reordered. I was able to sit back at my laptop with fresh inspiration after these interruptions that felt so inconvenient.
I didn’t know it at the time, but scientists have proven that inconveniences wake up our brains. They make us more creative—not only in an artistic sense but in the sense of thinking outside the box when it comes to any kind of problem. Psychology Today talks about a study that showed that “any life experience, from the traumatic to the joyful, can lead to flexibility and creativity as long as it diversifies your experiences and pushes you outside your normal thought patterns.” Researchers had participants put on virtual-reality goggles that had them walking through a cafeteria. For some of the participants, the virtual walk was entirely normal. The sights and sounds were exactly what you’d expect. Another group encountered weird occurrences, like a suitcase that got smaller as you approached it. The group that faced the unexpected scored significantly higher when they were later tested for cognitive flexibility.
The article suggests that if you want to be more creative in whatever kind of work you do, you should vary your routine: “Write with your other hand. Moonwalk backwards on your way to work. Eat something new for lunch. Smile at strangers.” These are good suggestions, but I find that those extraordinary measures aren’t necessary. For me, accepting the interruptions that are part of a normal day will expand my mind way more than moonwalking into my office.
Let Your Interruptions Keep You Focused
Living on the monk’s prayer schedule was almost a miracle cure for my procrastination. With gatherings six times a day, in addition to three community meals, it seemed like there was always a break looming. My second day there, I’d just settled in after midday prayer when I looked at the clock to see that I had only 40 minutes until lunch. At first I was exasperated. Then I realized that even if my afternoon were wide open, I probably wouldn’t do a whole lot more than 40 minutes of work anyway. I’d write a few sentences and get stuck. Then, feeling like I had infinite time before me, I’d start messing around. I’d “check Twitter real quick” and still be laughing at retweets an hour later. I’d take a quick look at a friend’s Facebook update, and before I knew it, I’d find myself eight paragraphs deep in the Wikipedia entry about the city she’s visiting.
None of that happened when I knew I had a hard break coming.
I’d flop into a chair in the retreat house lounge, open my laptop, and type furiously. No social media, no email. I wasn’t even tempted. I’d turn off my phone and set it under my chair. On the last day, I tallied my word counts. I was astonished to see that I wrote double—on some days, triple—my usual output. Back at home, sometimes Joe would take care of the house so I had an entire day when I could do nothing but write. I got vastly less done on those days than I did when I lived among the interruptions of a monastery prayer schedule.
It’s important to protect your time. Prioritize ruthlessly. Make your calendar spark joy as much as possible. But know that the goal of all this isn’t to block everyone out of your life or even to perfectly control when and how you interact with others. The goal is to share your life with intention. Just like when Jesus was interrupted by a sick woman on the way to heal a dying girl (see Luke 8:40–56), be open to letting people interrupt you now and then. And watch how your life, and even your work, is better for it.
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Adapted from Your Blue Flame: Drop the Guilt and Do What Makes You Come Alive by Jennifer Fulwiler. Click here to learn more about this book.
Break out of that rut and fall in love with your life again by joining stand-up comic, SiriusXM host, and mom of six Jennifer Fulwiler in finding your blue flame.
Every one of us has a blue flame–a special skill, a personal passion, a gift or talent. But when caught up in life’s busyness, it’s too easy to make a habit of suppressing our most joyful contributions to the world.
As Jennifer learned, the secret to a life you love isn’t necessarily jumping the track, quitting your job, or hustling to make your dream your full-time reality. Rather, it’s about doing more of what makes you come alive in your actual life. Your Blue Flame is your upbeat playbook to rekindling your energy, sparking those meaningful “first loves” back to life again, and discovering the unique way each one of us can make the world a better, brighter place.
With Jennifer’s wit and straight-forward, practical insights, this helpful guide will show you:
- How to channel your blue flame’s contagious energy
- Why your blue flame is both personally fulfilling and a sacred duty to others
- Tips and tricks to boldly make time for your passions
- How to rethink dreaming big for your actual life
No matter where you are in life, you’ll be inspired with stories of others who found their flames, like the couple who packed up their three kids and moved to a farm, the woman who discovered a passion for letter-writing at age ninety-five, and of course Jennifer’s own story of self-producing her own stand-up comedy tour after being turned down by the entertainment industry establishment.
It’s been said that the glory of God is the soul fully alive. It’s time to start chasing our spark, and Your Blue Flame will show you how.
Jennifer Fulwiler is a standup comic, the host of a daily talk show on SiriusXM, and the mom of six kids. She’s the author of the bestselling memoirs Something Other than God and One Beautiful Dream. After being told that there wasn’t an audience for standup comedy done by a minivan-driving woman from the suburbs, she self-produced her own tour, which is selling out venues across the country. Follow her on Instagram at @JenniferFulwiler.
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