Being creative is kind of like having an impulse to make something that doesn’t have any rhyme or reason to it, although it will when it’s finished. It’s like a distinct voice in our minds is telling us to create as if everything else at the moment is irrelevant, and we need to strike while the iron is hot or else we’ll lose the momentum and not create at all.
Once a work is finished, we might know the reasons why we created it through self reflection: to address some issue we’ve thinking about, to convey emotions we’ve been bottling up, to manifest a world that we’ve envisioned, or to share something that we’ve seen in our dreams. Regardless of the reason, the creative impulse is always telling us to create, telling us that there is a world beyond our own–a world of imagination that is calling to be brought into this world.
But the hardest thing about the creative impulse is to act on it when we’re so inundated with the everyday duties and obligations of life. We only have so much time in the day, so much energy and resources that we could put to use in creating something that requires hours, days . . . even years to finish. Not only that, but it takes time to sift through the flux of ideas that will appear in our minds when we can only focus on a few at a time. On top of that, new ideas will begin to emerge during the process of creation, calling for our attention–building up a backlog of ideas on our to-do list. And as we work on our current project(s) while postponing others, we begin to feel overwhelmed by everything, even saddened by the fact that we can’t get to them all.
In our lifetime, only so many creative works can be created out of the countless number of ideas we’ll have. We end up picking the ones that are the most important to us–the ones that reflect our values and vision the most. But if we ignore the creative impulse, refuse to capitalize on the powers of our imagination, we’ll slowly settle in to the everyday world, and all the wondrous and limitless ideas that we’ve collected during our creative journey will soon start to fade away.
Fallton Havenstonne 