Some weeks ago, I posed a simple question among 60,000 followers on LinkedIn: What is the surest refuge from the disturbances of daily life? The choices were few—Family, Friends, Play, Creative Work. The answers came in swiftly, and they surprised me by their unanimity. The majority spoke for ‘Creative Work’.
It was not a casual preference. It was, I sensed, an act of confession. For the modern person, besieged by noise and movement, there is little left that one can truly call one’s own. The world presses in—its demands, its distractions, its endless insistence on attention. Yet, in the act of creating something—however small, however private—one steps outside that pressure. There is, for a time, a reprieve.
Creative work holds this peculiar power because it is not an escape from the world; it is a return to the self that the world constantly erodes. To write, to design, to teach with imagination—these are not grand acts, but simple ones that restore a sense of order within. In creating, we discover again the quiet centre that remains untouched by circumstance.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave this experience a name—flow. It is a word that suggests ease, but its truth is sterner. In that state, time ceases to be measured. The divisions between thought and action disappear. One is wholly absorbed, neither anxious nor regretful, but alive in the present moment, as if life, for once, has become transparent. The ancient rishis of India described this as the state of samadhi.
This condition is not the privilege of artists or scholars. I have seen it in a surgeon’s calm, in a teacher’s patience, in an entrepreneur’s unflinching resolve. It belongs not to what they do, but to how they do it—with attention, with devotion, and a kind of surrender that is almost religious.
We live in an age where the mind is rarely still. We are distracted by the constant nearness of the world. In such a time, to work creatively, to enter flow, is to recover one’s humanity. It is to take the turbulence that once unsettled us and make it serve a higher order. The chaos remains, but it becomes intelligible; the fragments align.
Among the leaders I have known, the most remarkable were not those who sought to still the storm, but those who learned to move within it. They did not fight uncertainty; they shaped it. Their calm did not come from control, but from creation.
This, perhaps, is the secret of true leadership: not mastery over events, but an inner alignment that turns confusion into clarity. To find stillness amid movement—this is the rarest skill.
In the end, creative work is not a pastime. It is a necessity. It draws us from the scattered edges of our existence toward the centre, where we are most ourselves.
To create is not to flee life; it is to inhabit it fully. And in that, chaos transforms into cosmos. Herein lies our only chance at transcendence.
