Start with this: as you imagine making a living, don’t think factory. Think forest.

Your creative self sees “problems” not as anxiety-driving terrors but as opportunities to design original responses to any situation whatsoever.

The philosopher Frederick Buechner defined vocation, or life mission, as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

right-side spiral sparks curiosity and makes us want to create things.

I began to play with something I called “the art of calm,” because it was all about using creativity to calm my anxiety.

granite. To us, with our left-hemisphere focus on grabbable stuff, fluid things appear less powerful than rigid ones. But “water falling, day by day, wears the hardest rock away.” That which adapts and includes will win over that which rejects and excludes. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will

The point is that when we set out to build individual lives based on creativity rather than anxiety, the problems we face help stimulate the creative process. That’s wonderful news, because though we may run out of many resources, our supply of problems never goes dry.

Art and problem-solving are linked in this way: to address the most basic practical problems, the human mind may reach for high levels of creative invention. The tougher the problem, the more ingenuity the right brain may call up to craft a solution.

Here’s what the people who developed early antianxiety practices knew: The human mind is endlessly, unstoppably generative. It’s always making something. Always. The part of our brains that we’ve been taught to use is constantly creating concepts, stories, theories, competitive strategies, a sense of lack—and, of course, anxiety. To stop doing