Does the word consistency ever feel like a stern schoolteacher, red pen poised, ready to mark your every misstep? Like an unrelenting force whispering, If you’re not showing up every day, you’re failing?
For those of us pursuing something deeply personal – a creative calling, a heart-led business, a practice that feels like home – the pressure to be relentlessly consistent can feel suffocating. As if inspiration should arrive on demand, creativity should follow a schedule, and discipline should override the natural rhythms of life.
But what if we softened that expectation? What if, instead of the rigid pursuit of consistency, we embraced the quiet, steady hum of commitment?
Tending the flame
Commitment is different from consistency. It’s not about perfect attendance, ticking off boxes, or forcing yourself to create when your well is dry. Commitment is the ember that continues to glow beneath the surface, even when the fire isn’t roaring. It’s the gentle return—the choice, again and again, to nurture what matters most.
Take meditation. Does it really matter if you sit for 20 minutes one day and only five the next? Not at all. What matters is the intention. The act of making space. The decision to return, not because a checklist demands it, but because something inside you wants to.
The same goes for sharing your work in the world. The demand for constant content, daily posts, endless output—does it truly serve your creativity? Or does it drain the joy from it? What if you shifted your focus from how often you show up to how fully you show up? When you share, let it be with presence, not pressure. Like tending a garden – watering when needed, pruning when necessary, trusting that what you cultivate with care will bloom in its own time.
Love, creativity, and the practice of returning
In relationships, too, commitment isn’t about keeping a perfect score. It’s about choosing someone, again and again, in the quiet ways that matter. A soft check-in instead of a grand declaration. A gentle word instead of an elaborate gesture. The knowing that even in the messiness, the misunderstandings, the stretches of distance, the thread remains unbroken: I choose you.
We are not machines built for robotic consistency. We are human. We ebb, we flow, we wander, we return. And within each of us is a deep longing – to stay connected to what lights us up, to nurture the things we love, to keep coming back.
Commitment: A devotion, not a demand
Commitment isn’t rigid or punishing. It’s spacious. It asks, Do you love this enough to return to it, even when it’s hard? Even when you’ve stepped away for a while?
It’s a conversation, not a contract. A devotion, not a demand.
And when we hold commitment with tenderness—with the understanding that life moves in seasons, that creativity has its own rhythm, that devotion is something we choose rather than something we’re forced into—something beautiful happens.
We stop seeing our pauses as failures. We stop measuring ourselves by output alone.
We trust the ember, knowing we can always return to the fire.
