This Creative Life

Isn’t the world of creativity fascinating? For so many reasons, really. But I’ve always been fascinated by the unconscious aspects of the way we create, particularly how the unconscious feeds the creative mind, almost as if it is a direct channel from the soul.

What makes the whole thing even more fascinating to me is this: no matter how many times I am dragged away from my creative world—by the hustle and bustle of life, by lack of time, lack of resources—it seems that I always come back to it. Always. Like something bigger than me is in charge of this whole crazy shindig.

Over the years I’ve struggled with finding focus within my creative world, and I suspect that many creative artists might feel the same way. Because the thing is this: creative energy doesn’t seem to care how it gets out. All it seems to care about is that it gets out.

I feel an affinity to many of the disciplines within the arts—music, acting, writing, painting, the list goes on. And the choice as to which discipline to use in order to create (to tell that story of my soul, you might say) really doesn’t feel like a conscious choice at all. To me, the urge to create is exactly that. An urge. A push. A tug. It’s the magnetic pull to the piano, or the computer, or the scrapbook—and I get the impression that my only job is just to go with the flow and get swept along in the breeze of it all.

In my experience, this is such a hard concept for the rational mind to reconcile. Because the rational mind, the one I use to bring sense to everything, seems to crave control. It seems to be at odds with all the wonder that explodes so organically within my creative universe. It seems to want to make sense of something that simply cannot be explained. The imagination. I mean. How can such a wondrous, wondrous world ever be explained?

There are not too many things I am totally sure of in this world. But what I am sure of is this: every single person in this whole wide world has a unique imagination. And every single creative artist sets their imagination free like nobody else in this world. We all see the world differently. We all live in the world differently.

What a lovely creative mess that’s all bound to make.