Handbuilding a Life: A Year of Creative Living, Slow Making, and Millennial Meaning

My friend Erin sent me a Derek Sivers quote right around the first anniversary of me handing in my notice:

“The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never shared. Most people die with their greatness still in them.”

It landed like a thud in my chest — not in a grim way, but as a reminder of how much beauty we leave unexplored when we’re too busy surviving to actually live.

This week marks one year since I traded the metrics and meetings of my corporate life for clay-streaked hands and kiln-fired days. I didn’t leave because I had it all figured out — far from it. In 2020, I fell apart.

That year, tucked away in Murrumbateman, the world slowed to a hush. The lockdowns stretched long and strange, and in the stillness, I turned 35 — only to find myself cracking open. There was no crisis to blame, no singular event. Just the unravelling of a life built on autopilot. I was “successful” by every measure I’d been taught to chase — good job, good salary, good sense — yet everything felt brittle.

It was as if my spirit had been coiled too tightly for too long.

Something had to give.

So I did what I now know was the beginning of my real work — not the kind with KPIs or annual reviews, but the kind that requires your whole heart. I began to handbuild a life.

At first, it was messy. I wasn’t sculpting some grand plan; I was kneading small truths back into shape. Pottery taught me to listen again — to slow down, to pay attention, to honour imperfection. Each mug, each bowl, each page became a lesson in patience, presence, and trust.

Whistle & Page wasn’t born in 2020, but that’s when I started really living it.

The name itself — dreamt up years earlier in 2014 — had always carried whispers of what I longed for: warmth, connection, ritual, story. By 2020, those whispers became a call. The work became both the salve and the structure — shaping clay, shaping words, shaping myself.

I found work that looked perfect on paper — meaningful, cause-driven. I poured myself into it. But the system was sharp-edged and fast-paced, built to burn out even the well-intentioned. And eventually, it did.

On 8 October 2024, I handed in my notice.

On 1 November, I stepped — terrified but steady — into a creative life full time.

And here’s the thing: the work hasn’t become easier. It’s just become truer.

Every day now feels like both a risk and a prayer — a balance of art and livelihood, of showing up and letting go. I don’t have a grand five-year plan. What I have instead is rhythm. Clay drying on the shelves. Dogs underfoot. Books in progress. Workshops filled with laughter and hands discovering their own stories in the clay and the making.

I often think about my generation — the millennials — and how we’ve been stretched across two worlds. We grew up in an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. We’ve watched the shift from slow to fast, from enough to more, from craft to consumption. We’re the generation that still remembers boredom — and how it once led to creativity.

Now, we scroll. We optimise. We perform. And somewhere between the algorithms and ambition, we forget that fulfilment doesn’t live in more. It lives in enough.

Millennials carry a strange ache — the desire to live meaningfully in a system that rewards speed over depth. To make art when the world wants metrics. To be present in a culture addicted to distraction. We’re tired, yes. But we’re also awake — awake to what truly matters, even if it takes time and therapy and a thousand tiny breakdowns to remember it.

Slow, intentional, wholehearted living isn’t glamorous. It’s work. The kind that doesn’t shout or sell, but builds something lasting from the inside out. It’s cleaning your tools before dawn. It’s holding a half-formed piece of clay and resisting the urge to rush it dry. It’s accepting that the life you’re shaping might collapse, crack, or turn out nothing like you pictured — and showing up again anyway.

That’s what it means to handbuild a life.

It’s not about perfection or balance or having it all. It’s about being in it — grounded, grateful, gloriously unfinished. It’s about doing the work even when no one sees. It’s about leaving nothing unlived, unmade, unsaid.

And if Derek Sivers is right — if the graveyard holds the world’s unused greatness — then I want to make sure mine runs out of space long before I do.

Because the work of Whistle & Page isn’t just pottery or children’s books or community. It’s a way of being — an act of choosing, every day, to create something real in a world obsessed with the instant.

One slow, handbuilt piece at a time.

And to everyone who has gathered around this journey — thank you. For the cups you’ve cradled, the stories you’ve shared, the moments you’ve made part of this evolving work. You’ve helped shape not just a creative practice, but a life — one fired by connection, held together by love, and still, always, in the making.

Until next time,
Nawsheen, your friendly homebody artist from Murrumbateman.