Steven’s blend of artistry and pragmatism makes him one of the wiser people I know. After you read this guest post, you might want to check out the upcoming workshop June 25-28 with the bestselling authors of “Your Brain on Art,” Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen, which is so aligned with this point of view.
Spend enough time with Chip Conley, and you’ll hear the word chrysalis. He doesn’t use it lightly. He uses it as both a midlife weather forecast and a celebration.
A chrysalis is messy. The old self disintegrates before the new one fully arrives. You can’t rush it without deforming the outcome. And if you’ve lived long enough, you recognize the feeling: what used to fit now constricts, and something yet-to-be-named wants to emerge.
What Chip offers isn’t a denial of crisis, but a reframe—midlife not as decline, but as listening differently.
Here’s a view from the studio of life.
When coaching clients and leaders ask how to navigate midlife, they often expect life hacks or routines. While refining our ritual and routines in midlife makes loads of sense, I ask this instead: Where in your life are you making something that doesn’t yet know what it wants to become?
Let’s talk about the potency of art in midlife.
Running alongside the strategized and systematized professional life or entrepreneurial journey has always been another: a life where the unnamed, unfamiliar, and unfinished isn’t a flaw—it’s the point.
And I no longer see that life of human artistry as “side practice.” It’s developmental, relational, cathartic, and, yes, potentially spiritual.
Midlife is a turning point. As C. G. Jung observed, the first half of life is about building identity—competence, contribution, credibility. The second half asks: Who am I now? What matters next? How does lived wisdom serve a greater good? The psyche (or soul) speaks in a different language. It ceases speaking in tactics, strategies, and plans and starts speaking in symbols, metaphors, and myths. It asks for integration, not optimization. Push too hard for certainty, and the psyche resists—quietly at first, then louder if it hasn’t gotten your attention.
Art gives you access to that language and to the world of your personal and collective unconscious.
When I paint, I rarely know what I’m making until I nearly finish. Non-fiction writing can articulate what I think I know; poetry reveals what I didn’t know I knew. Both art and writing are somatic. They arise from an attentive body and an excavated psyche. A surprising sentence shows up seemingly out of nowhere. Then another. Meaning arrives later. That attention matters. It creates space for gnosis, a deeper kind of knowing.
Neuroscience agrees. Art-making lights up the brain in integrated ways—engaging emotion, memory, motor coordination, spatial reasoning, and sustained attention in synchrony. Studies using neuroimaging show that creative activity increases connectivity across regions of the brain associated with cognitive flexibility and resilience, even into midlife and beyond.
Longhand writing, such as journaling, cultivates thought in ways typing does not. Research by Mueller and Oppenheimer and others has shown that writing by hand improves memory encoding and conceptual understanding, because the slower pace forces the writer to synthesize ideas rather than transcribe them. When cognitive maintenance matters, this kind of embodied thinking is a form of brain fitness.
People often ask, “Do I have to be good at art making?” No. The brain doesn’t care about innate talent or outcomes. The brain responds to engagement, and the psyche responds to depth, sincerity, and presence.
Art making matters especially in midlife, when unresolved material begins to surface—old griefs, deferred dreams, parts of ourselves we postponed development. Without a container or practice, this energy shows up as anxiety, stress, or restlessness. Through artwork, it can be metabolized. Art gives our psyche form and an outlet to express the unconscious.
James Hillman argued that the psyche develops through imagination as much as insight. Making art gives imagination somewhere to go—somewhere to move through complexity without forcing absolute certainty.
That’s why I appreciate Chip’s metaphor. To me, the chrysalis is a verb pointing toward becoming. It’s active, and art fuels the chrysalis transformation by encouraging the expression of the psyche. It rewards patience, tolerates ambiguity, and strengthens attention over time. And it protects the things we fear losing—memory, focus, and mental agility.
For me, art making has meant keeping a studio practice even when it made no sense, writing longhand when typing would be faster, and trusting that what looks unproductive on the surface is often the most generative work of all.
-Steven
From creating artwork to studying Depth Psychology and training in Somatic Experiencing, MEA alum Steven Morris is an ever-curious brand and culture-building expert, best-selling author of “The Beautiful Business,” and seeker who’s served 3,000+ business leaders at more than 275 companies — discover more at: https://matterco.co/