On Committing to Your Creativity

You Have to Stay In the Groove

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Cutie lil creative me

There’s a story I’ve told other times in other places about the last day I spent with my grandma.

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1997, so my brother and I were home from school. My grandma cared for us that day in the same way she always had over the years — feeding us warm creamed chipped beef over dark toast, cottage cheese with sugar sprinkled on top on the side; encouraging us to “use our imaginations” as she went about her own business, and sitting dutifully as our lone audience member when, later that afternoon, we wanted to share all that our imaginations had come up with.

I wrote a poem that day. I don’t remember much about it, except that it flowed easily and playfully as the best poems do — as the best artistic efforts at anything do — because the stakes were low. The stakes were nonexistent, in fact! I just had the gentle push of my grandma to go make something; and later, her unfettered excitement to be privy to what I’d produced with nothing other than the inventiveness of my young mind and limited life experience.

There is another essay in me — probably many of them — about how she would pass away later that day; about how I would later read that same poem aloud at her funeral. But it’s my memory of those last moments with her that has stood out to me lately; those last moments where she did what she’d always done with me, which is to say, “Go play! Go make something! Go scribble a story and come back to share it with me.” 

Go create!

At my therapist’s suggestion, I recently read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. It’s a short, easy read, sneaking in a lot of brilliance in a little package. 

“In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are,” he says. 

That was certainly true when I was younger; making up stories — even those that didn’t seem rooted in my personal experience, though of course they were — was how I figured out who I was and what I thought and what (and who) I liked and didn’t.

Without realizing it, creating new worlds was how I made sense of the one I was in; my stories were an escape from issues I didn’t know how to articulate or process, and also how I mapped my way through them.

Also, it was just fun!

This has been my experience as an adult too, whenever I’ve returned to making things; whenever I’ve made space for my own creativity — which has been intermittent over the years.

I've had my dalliances with creativity, of course — a few essays and short stints of creative challenges (The 100-Day Project, anyone?) and even, briefly, my own published magazine. But they've been just that — dalliances; compressed and uncommitted.

Why? I started to wonder a few years ago. And the only answer I could come up with was, “Because you’re an adult.”

Because you have responsibilities.

Because you have to be productive to pay your bills.

Because you’re not 12 years old anymore, and the opportunity for unfiltered ingenuity is over.

Finding time to play, to make, to scribble a story, to create seemed like a nice to have. Cute, but trivial. 

“With what time?” I wondered. “To what end? How is that productive?”

Words: Ursula K. Le Guin // Inspiration: Holisticism // Original source unknown

I was listening to a guided meditation the other day that asked me to revisit various points of my early life — my younger childhood and early teens: What was I doing? How did I spend my time? What would I still be doing now, if I had all of the time and money I could want or need?

I was creating.

I was writing poems that I read aloud to my grandma, standing proudly in front of her TV set as she cheered from the couch. I was creating new stories for my dolls that I diligently recorded in the blank books they came with. I was perched in our swing set playhouse, scribbling observations in my Composition notebook about our passing neighbors (just like Harriet the Spy, natch). 

I was committed to my creativity; to always digging deep into the recesses of my mind, pulling things I'd seen, heard, imagined, and cobbling them together into something new. 

It was boundless, fun, bad, unfiltered, cringe, proud, open, raw, clever, and playful.

It was creative. I was free.

Austin says, “Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.” That’s the creative commitment I’ve returned to recently; the sort I thought I was only allowed access to as a child.

I prioritize activities that get my wheels turning — like taking a new class or reading an entire book in one day. I "assign" myself projects that have no purpose but to stretch my creative muscles. I try not to immediately judge every creative effort (my own or other peoples’) and instead view any sort of art through a curious lens. 

Mostly, I give myself space to do things that don't always feel productive (though sometimes they do, which I also like — being creative is inherently productive in my eyes!), but they always feel good. They feel fun. They feel interesting. They help me think, be playful, experiment, fail, succeed, try, and create a world I want to live in.

Image via Amanda Bucci

It's not always easy to stay committed to it; not like it was when I was performing poetry readings in my Grandma’s living room. And I'm not suggesting it's easy to fit something that could feel frivolous into an already overstuffed life. 

I'm just suggesting that maybe there's a way to move creative time further up the list of your to-dos. 

I'm just suggesting that you can commit to your creativity at any age; that it will be just as beneficial to you at 39 (as I am now) as it was at 13.

I’m just suggesting that recommitting to your creativity allows you to place greater value on what children already inherently know — our brains, our bodies, our very existence are designed for fun, for pleasure, for imagination and ideas, and experimenting with the interplay of all of that together.

Why would we stop doing that as we get older, when we only have even more of the world at our fingertips?

. . . our brains, our bodies, our very existence are designed for fun, for pleasure, for imagination and ideas, and experimenting with interplay of all of that together. Why would we stop doing that as we get older, when we only have even more of the world at our fingertips?

Easier said than done, of course, to return to a creative practice as an adult. To rewrite the stories that say, "You're too old for this", "You have better things to do", "Don't be childish", "Get your priorities straight".

Yeah, get your priorities straight! I am. 

I am prioritizing the things I want to create. I am making things just because they feel fun. I am offering myself the unfiltered creative freedom and boundless encouragement that my grandma used to give to me.

I am utilizing this brief human experience in exactly the way I believe I was meant to — by taking what I see and understand and experience and playing with it all to create something altogether new, including many things that I hope to one day share here with you.

“Inertia is the death of creativity,” Austin says. “You have to stay in the groove.”

And I am.

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• Idea: Set aside some time this week to be creative. Make space to return to whatever creative activity you couldn’t get enough of as a child — bonus points if you are raising/live with children; they will have so many good ideas! — or take yourself on what Julia Cameron calls an “Artist Date”, where you set aside a block of time to nurture your inner artist. Maybe you go to an art museum or wander the aisles of a bookstore for hours (my preference!). Maybe you go see a movie or pull out a canvas and some paints. There are no real rules, except to make it something your inner artist really wants to do.

• Anecdote: Speaking of Ms. Cameron, I’ve attempted “The Artist’s Way” a few times over the last 15 years, and I just recently started it again with a group of people in

  Ali Griffin Vingiano
  ’s community. (So, if you do go on Artist Date, please share it with me, because I need ideas too!) If you're unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a book created and made famous by writer, Julia Cameron, that leads you through a 12-week program designed to reconnect you to your creativity. It really is an incredible, if rigorous, program — and though we’re only on week two, I’m feeling hopeful about my ability to stick with it this time (mostly, thanks to everything I shared in the essay above!). Creative commitment had been on my mind even before I came to revisit Ms. Cameron's well-known creative bootcamp — and I’ll have much more to share on the topic throughout this month! — but taking part in the program, especially with the support of a whole community of fellow creatives, couldn’t have come at a better time.

• Inspiration: “Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.” - Anni Albers, “Weaving in a College”, n.d.

Inspiration found via Holisticism // Original source unknown

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