In various recent conversations with clients and friend groups, people have been describing similar and specific behaviors exhibited by those close to them. For some, there seems to be this urgency, sometimes manically displayed, and a panic to do things swiftly; some of which seem to go against what the person says or against what might be considered normal behavior.
The people that these folks were referring to are creatives. Some of them are artists, many of them, are in jobs that don’t engage their creativity. While that may sound benign to some, creativity kind of has a life or agenda of its own. The muse, or our creative passions, will express themselves whether we will it or not; no matter what we are up to at any given time.
Giving our creativity space and time to play, to exercise, to be amused can help curb its appetite for expression in areas that can’t really feed it, and where it might make a mess of work relationships, traffic patterns; the business of life. That's not to say that the business of life couldn’t use a makeover!
Artists are creative by nature however even those who aren’t creating art may think and operate in creative ways. Sometimes this shows up as people building elaborate narratives about a situation based on little blips of information. Because of our survival wiring, our minds like to make sense of things, and our minds will sometimes create and finish a story just so that we don’t feel threatened by not knowing. This train of thought can be linked to an addiction to certainty, which I explore in a past blog post.
As Elizabeth Gilbert assesses expertly,
“If your calling is to make things, then you still have to make things in order to live out your highest creative potential - and also to remain sane. (A creative mind) needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.”
She speaks to this as well by admitting that when she’s not actively creating something then she is probably actively destroying something.
What made me throw her book Big Magic, creative living beyond fear book across the room before I realized I love this, is that I read it moments after writing the above phrases of my own. Of course this was frustrating at first. I felt like, “ Why do I bother writing anything; everything I’m engaging in is sending me these message-directions from people who are already published. It’s like we are on a tandem bike, pedaling the same ideas only theirs are out there already. It’s all been said, who am I to say it again and what can I bring to this conversation?”
After a few moments of self pity followed by some reflections on reality, I reframed that negative self-talk into is this: “Well, sometimes that’s how you find out that you’re on point! And you will find your own voice in expressing these ideas. And you might express them in a way that is new for someone who hasn’t read these published works. And you might express them in a way that can be better understood by people that just don’t get those published views. Don’t give up, babe; be encouraged by this!”
So, while I feel like I’m on the front end of this metaphorical tandem bike, getting these ideas and just starting to flesh them out, these established writers are right behind me, pedaling away at some new idea and waiting for me to glance back at them so they can give me a thumbs up. That’s my current fantasy about that anyways.
It might be a great idea to see our creativity as we would a lover - take it on dates, engage it in pleasurable activities, ask it what it likes; what makes it sing.
And also to prepare ourselves for when we ignore our creativity and expect it to show up at our every beck and call.
Of the myriad books on creativity, one workbook that has helped me stay engaged is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Cameron mentions artist dates and offers ideas on disciplines and/or regularly scheduled engagement with our creativity.
Like any venture we embark on, we probably won’t be amazing at doing this at first. Or we may have beginner's luck and find that luck waning thereafter. Expectations and a perfectionist mindset are anathema to creativity, not to mention being dangerous and delusional traps.
Creativity is playful, it requires curiosity about what is happening in the moment as well as what might happen next; so remember to play!