Ten years ago I found myself in a lull. It seemed like many of the questions I had fantasized about as a kid had been answered: Would I ever kiss a boy? Where would I live? What kind of career would I pursue? Would I marry? Would I have kids? And while I could now answer these, there were deeper questions I couldn’t shake: What’s my purpose? How do I contribute? What am I here for?
At the end of that summer, sitting at the edge of the still waters of Great Pond in Maine I gazed out and these bigger questions got louder and louder. This visit to my parents’ cabin provided me the much needed relief from my boys (.5 and 2.5 years old) to be able to begin to hear the questions in the first place. My mother is a student of life and a collector of books of all kinds. In one of her stacks I pulled out Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way.” I’d seen the book before, but my inner voice “you’re not an artist” had kept me from digging in. Now I had the time and the space to open the book and begin.
The practices were gentle and available. I quickly took to the morning pages and made a commitment to follow the book to the end with whatever pockets of time I could create. I had intermittently kept a journal, and the new daily routine of sitting down with paper and pen felt comforting. I wasn’t writing for others, or to publish a book, but just for me, and there is magic in putting words on paper. I truly believe that if we could all commit to connecting to our authentic expression, the world would be a better place.
Today the word creativity feels a cringe-worthy. Creativity is sold in the aisles at Michaels; it’s bedazzling your pocketbook, but it’s so much more. Researcher Brene Brown says “The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity.” It is how we express ourselves. It’s taking some unnamed thing inside of us and spinning it into physical reality. We use our hands, an extension of our heart, to make something that wasn’t there before. Brown also says “You want to move stuff from your head to your heart? You’ve got to use your hands.”
Now, as we endure COVID19, we are asked to draw heavily from the well of creativity. How will we make this new way work? Fear may be using a lot of our energy, but if we turn toward creativity, in any form, we can begin to get into the flow. Fortunately, Maya Angelou says, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.” We will figure out how to live in a new way. Our fear of the unknown would have us re-create something as familiar as possible, but is that what we want?
