Creativity
When the universe seems to be sending you signals, its best to pay attention.
Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about creativity—how it works, what fuels it, what inspires it, and what prevents it.
From a podcast reminding its listeners of the importance of boredom for creativity, to reading authors like Stephen King and Anne Lamott describe their writing process, to Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about your elusive creative genius, to a conversation just this past week with my friend like Jim Kast-Keat about how he creates great projects like his Thirty Seconds or Less videos. (He describes his creative process as something akin to throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what happens.)
Creativity. Its a common thing. We create all kinds of art, theatre, music, school lesson plans, woodworking, gardens, beer, designing, writing, business plans, you name it. We may not have created ourselves, and yet we do create and craft and shape our lives as we tend to our relationships, work, and callings.
Human beings create things. That’s what we do.
While creativity might be something we all share, I bet that we would each describe it differently. Everyone seems to have there own unique creative process. How is it that creativity is universal and yet so particular to each person?
While scientists are understanding more about the biology of creativity as they study and better understand the brain, creativity also remains, at least for me, a very spiritual thing. In my experience, creativity is something that often comes to me, not from me, and its not something I can necessarily predict or control. Even if I know the morning is my most creative time and that my favorite coffee shop seems just the place to spark my writing, I still don’t know what will happen until I sit down to work. It feels like a gift. It feels like the work of the spirit.
Here are some questions to get us thinking:
What do you create? What is your creative process? How would you describe it? What do you think about the science and spirituality of creativity?