Welcome readers! I am pleased to have you join me on this quest to find the missing piece: where did my creativity go? It isn’t missing—we just have to look carefully to find it! Creativity is something I have struggled to keep a constant in my life. As an artist myself, I feel that there isn’t enough time in a day, I can’t fully be present, or I lose the motivation and inspiration to continue doing what I love. In this place, I hope you find some clarity in how you feel, understand how your feelings work within a greater system, and lend yourself grace and compassion to explore and learn in ways that serve you best. Let’s begin our journey!
I don’t believe in a list of ideas that can make us more creative. Of course, we can do different things that WE define as creative. Maybe we decide to draw for 10 minutes per day or take ourselves to a dance class. But this falls into a common misconception I witness: creativity does not equal the arts. We do not need to dance, draw, write poetry, act in an improv class, or paint a painting bigger than our living room in order to be creative. These are regular mediums in which people decide to explore their creativity. However, to be creative is by definition “inventive, imaginative; of, relating to, displaying, using, or involving imagination or original ideas as well as routine skill and intellect.”1 There is no possible way to say that you are not creative. The key word in that definition is imagination! I truly enjoy expressing my creativity through artistic mediums, but creativity, I believe, is a verb, and can exist within each interaction if we so let it.
As an experienced dancer, I regularly get the comment “I wish I could dance like you, my feet just don’t move like that,” as if I woke up one morning and miraculously found out I could hip-hop dance to the moon. And this isn’t just for dance. People in the arts regularly get comments in this similar vein: “Wow you’re so talented (meaning a natural aptitude or skill for something),” but these individuals are not naturally gifted. They go through years and years of work, training and practice. If you would like to be a dancer, you can be, thanks to creativity! Thanks to that imaginative part of your brain, you CAN imagine being creative and being a great dancer. However, one takeaway I find important is asking yourself do I really want this thing or do I want what comes with it? That means: would I like to be a great dancer or do I want the gratification from performing and having a grand applause, to receive compliments from friends, to look “cool” to people around me etc. This is important to notice because it’s okay if you realize that you actually don’t want something.
As a teenager, I wanted to be a rockstar. I would think of how amazing it would be to be on the stage performing and being the best drummer, but this was because I didn’t actually want that thing (to be in a rock band), I wanted people to recognize me as someone cool, interesting, and inspiring. However, as I am a dancer, it is the music that my soul sings and the music that connects me to similar souls. I am happy practicing, messing up, embarrassing myself, and existing on the journey because this is what I love. Western capitalist societies display an idea that success means perfection—if you are not the best of the best, you have failed, or shouldn’t have even tried in the first place. As a result, people don’t even try to go after what they would like to explore, things that they are curious about for fear that they will “fail”, embarrass themselves, and waste their time. Except, I want to tell you a secret: Truly, nothing can be a waste of time if your soul is happy in the process.
And now we ponder the question again: but how can I be more creative? I want you to bring in that inner child, your imagination, and that genuine child-like curiosity for life again. One has to be willing to see creativity as something different than one has understood it to be previously. If it isn’t just the arts, maybe it is something else. Creativity is noticing that you have a gift as a human that is connected to each and every other human. Many of us don’t feel creative and continue to search for ways to be creative every day. What that really means is being curious and imaginative again—being willing to let yourself out of the routine and explore, and learning how to be present in each moment. Much of our society exists within routine: work 9-5 for 60 years of your life, wake up at 8 am everyday for class, and eat dinner at 6 pm each day. And, in doing so, the creativity of the moment has been lost. So what should we do? Break that routine! Even simply thinking to myself that I could have breakfast food for dinner is so exciting. I feel this rush in my soul that my inner child is giggling to themself, thinking of the dinner-breakfast food scene in their favourite movie, Coraline, and thinking about how silly it sounds. Break out of your routine and let that creativity shine.
For me, creativity means possibility. It means spontaneity, listening to my soul’s yearning for a brighter future and a loving world. Quite many artistic mediums are how people explore their creativity, and that is no mistake. It is because these experiences ask for presence. They ask you to take time that isn’t rushed and explore, create, make mistakes, problem solve, and ultimately, be alive while noticing that liveness. I truly believe that creativity is a way to live—a form of showing up for your loved ones and community, and ways to slow down and listen to the body. You might not be able to write 3 pages in your journal every day to meet the capitalist creativity quota but what you can do is focus on the underlying concepts that allow creativity in: curiosity, mindfulness, presence, embracing mistakes, and overall, being imaginative! Among these concepts, we not only find ways to foster creativity in our daily lives, but welcome new ways to think about our lives, how we want to live, how we can support our communities, and decide the value systems we want to live by in each moment.
References:
[1] Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/.