The Liberation of Limitation
Me and my oldest son on a subway platform in New York City.
The selection at one of 8,000 bakeries to choose from if you need to stop for a treat on the way home from work.
French pastries at 6am. Sashimi for lunch. Ethiopian takeout after work. Izakaya at Midnight. Southern-fried chicken and collards at 3am. This is the day in the culinary life of a New Yorker. I know because I was one for the better part of a decade before moving to Kalamazoo. Whatever you want, it’s available. “The Thousand Best” is an expertly curated, guide to New York’s best restaurants and bars continually updated by nymag.com so that New Yorkers can always be up on the latest and best offerings to satisfy whatever culinary whim hits them. And food is only one category of luxuries of which there is a seemingly endless supply offered to modern big city-dwellers. You want a pedicure at 5am before your biometric spin class? No problem. Feel like dressing up as an elephant tomorrow? You can have that costume delivered to your office by noon. Need a 5-tier cake for a last-minute birthday celebration? Just grab it on the way home (but be prepared to make hard choices because there’s 6 to choose from.)
Before I lived in New York I craved endless access to the exotic. I moved there because I thought it was the ultimate environment in which to foster my creativity. After all, it couldn’t be an accident that the most creative people in the world put themselves there, right? Years into my New York experiment a simultaneously terrifying and liberating thought occurred to me: what if the most creative people in the world don’t live here? What I know now is that the Midwest is home to some of the most interesting and creative humans I’ve ever met. Jerico itself is a beautiful example of this.
I’m thankful on a regular basis for so many reasons that we somehow found our way out of that world and to this one: a small-ish Midwest city that is not exactly known for it’s bountiful ethnic cuisine or high-end shopping opportunities. But of all of the reasons I’m thankful, I’m most aware of all of the ways that living with the limitations of this environment has heightened my creativity in ways that never would have been possible in the urban zoo of unfettered access to everything all of the time.
It takes a lot of energy to constantly give yourself that gut check of “just because I can doesn’t mean I should.” What if that energy was being spent differently? Steve Jobs was famous for his unchanging uniform of a black turtleneck and jeans. Many other highly successful entrepreneurs and artists have adopted his restricted sartorial approach in an effort to spend less time and energy decoding the always-changing trends of fashion and more time and energy making the big things happen.
Left: cover of Vogue Magazine, perfectly perfected. Right: cover of Esquire Magazine by George Lois, genius.
Unlimited possibility often leads to “shiny object syndrome,” a common stumbling block of creative professionals in every industry. One of my roles at Condé Nast Publications was as creative director of Domino Magazine’s first rebirth after it folded at the height of the great recession. To my delight, I was assigned the most coveted color artist in the building to work with me on the cover of the first issue. One day when we were finalizing the color work on our cover he offered to show me his Photoshop files from all of his work on Vogue’s covers for the past several years. Every single one of them was a work of art, but absolutely nothing about any of those covers was revolutionary. If clouds were desired, clouds were produced. If bodies were the wrong shape, they were recreated. If skin was the wrong tone, it was adjusted. It seemed like there were no limits to what was possible, and admittedly, the covers were beautiful. But were they ground-breaking? With all due respect to the talented photographers and art directors involved, there’s definitely more compelling magazine covers out there. One Google search for “George Lois Esquire” proves this point.
If you’ve ever practiced mindfulness, you may have experienced the enlightenment of limiting your thoughts singularly to the moment you’re in. When the endless stream of thoughts, memories and lists are arrested and held at bay even momentarily, we can finally be present with ourselves and connect to something bigger. This is the moment, in the absence of the distractions of a million possibilities, that we tap into our creativity in new ways.
Me in my studio at Jerico. Photo by Elemental Media.
It takes a lot of discipline to take yourself off of the grid of unlimited access. Let’s face it, the internet has ushered in a brave new world where putting yourself in a place of real limitations is almost impossible. But building restrictions into your creative practices are a counter-cultural act of resistance and creative self-preservation. Recently I have been experimenting with this concept through the medium of Risograph, intentionally imposing it’s limits on my process, design and final product. I can’t say it’s always fun. In fact I find that I’m quite often frustrated at some point in each project. But I do find the act of slowing down, rethinking my approach, and even in some cases beginning again entirely has been net-positive.
Limitations force us to have experiences we might not otherwise choose. And learn how to do things we might not otherwise have learned to do. Not having access to a million world-class restaurants has forced me to learn to cook—and to actually become a good cook. But let’s face it, going to an amazing restaurant is still a treat now and then. Likewise, there are plenty of times that I don’t want limitations. As a modern human I have the privilege of turning that switch on and off in many ways, mindful of the reality that there is ultimately a trade-off for that privilege.
There are certainly still examples of unfettered access for which I have accepted those trade-offs: the ability to research anything online instantly, and all kinds of content and music streaming are two of my favorites. But more and more people like me are leaving big cities for places like Kalamazoo and Jerico, and affordability isn’t the only reason. Here, our ideas can breathe. We enjoy the beautifully crafted caffeinated beverages of Start Here Coffee. And we are inspired by beauty that isn’t sparkly and focus-group tested but instead is powered by the gritty, scrappy, creative humans and natural world around us.
About Alyson: Alyson Cameron is a communicator, art director and designer who is interested in doing work that has a positive impact on her community and the world. In a previous life, Alyson led print and digital teams at Condé Nast Publications as the Design Director of the Editorial Development Group, working for brands such as The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Domino, Gourmet, and more. Alyson now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her family and enjoys exploring her new home state, staying up late, and messing around on her risograph.
