I regularly work with clients who have creative goals—making pottery, writing poetry, actually using the sketch pad they’ve purchased or been given as a gift. Sometimes these aspirations come up almost apologetically: “Of course, it’s not practical and I have so little time, but what I’d really like to be doing is—”
Frequently they come to light in an exercise where clients write stories about experiences in their lives which gave them a deep sense of personal satisfaction, e.g., this description of a drawing class written by a woman who manages construction projects: “I loved how I felt when I was doing these drawings. There was a connection between my soul and the paper.”
Occasionally, the need to put hands to clay or pen to paper has become so important to a client that the failure to be able to do it become the focal point of our discussion. This is always exciting to me because it is an unconscious recognition of the link between the artistic urge and transforming a work life.
Because 
Recently I was on my way home from a visit to a friend in Philadelphia, and after I boarded the train at 30th Street Station and settled into my seat, I noticed a man in his mid-fifties across the aisle from me. 
It’s pretty clear to most baby boomers that they will be creating, either by choice or circumstances, a very different kind of retirement from their parents, for whom it simply meant, stop working. 
Last month the manuscript of my first book, Ground of Your Own Choosing, finally went to the publisher. You can’t imagine the relief I feel to be approaching the completion of this intense, time-devouring project. 
I was standing in line at one of those office superstores to buy a plastic file box as preparation (and motivation) for the annual ritual of cleaning up my files, and I happened to glance up at a huge poster with an incredible promise. There, within that very building, it claimed, was everything I needed to be “wildly organized”. 
