Shutting off from the important
Life and Responsibilities
As you get along in life, moving ever further away from your child's mind you find that life has a way of layering responsibilities on you...
- The Bills
- The Mortgage
- The Loans
- The Career
- The Partner
- The Kids
- The Work
- The House
- The Car
- The Job
- The Drama of it all
And more...
You move along in your career getting better and more expert in the things you do at your job and for your work. You tell yourself these are the 'important things'. You become increasingly detached from curiosity, allowing your dreams to fade, and possibly disappear altogether.
But within you, in those areas long shut off, your dreams still exist, waiting for the invite to come out and get involved. They're just there, below the surface and if you just spend a small amount of time and effort you'll get to peer in at them and you'll see they're just as vibrant, just as exciting and just as full of wonder as ever. It's still possible to be curious, it's still possible to live in wonder of what a single day can hold, and it's still possible to be more creative than you've ever been. It's still possible to find a version of 'you', the person who is still able to imagine the impossible as if it were real and true.
As you're reading this, you might be feeling you've had your shot, you've had your time as it were. But I can recall a time when I once thought it'd be an achievement to write a book, I was early in my teens, and then this idea got put away with all the other crazy ideas. But the pandemic allowed me the time to take another look and try out the idea that I could write a book, and so I did and I wrote a book. The process was so freeing that I decided to do it again, quicker and with more focus on the finished book than last time, this time I want more from the process. I also decided to reimagine my freelance business consulting activities, viewing them through a more creative lens. Less same-same and much, much more different-different.
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I've found that once you've identified and engaged with the essential elements of the process of creativity then all the rest just falls into place. When you begin to use creative thinking independent of activity type or output type then you can work creatively on just about anything you wish to.
As you reconsider and reimagine what it is you want to do, you suddenly find you can see and do things in ways that others just haven't been able to so far. And once you've had something of a taste of this 'newly creative way' of seeing and doing things then you'll never go back, instead, you'll find yourself continually trying to recapture that feeling when you realised you can creatively work out solutions and processes and ways of doing things.
I wrote my first book not by being lucky, or by magic, but by removing all the myths I'd told myself or allowed myself to come to believe were true and tackling the process of creatively writing a book through the application of a disciplined approach to the work. If you take the time to look you'll find that creativity is a part of all of us, right from the day of our birth, it's in our DNA. But creativity is then more often than not parked-up, not required here and like anything that's shut away and discarded it becomes weak and withered from unuse. So this means then that creativity is like a muscle and left unused will get weaker but if used will get stronger, this is very much in the vein of a learnable skill and any person can if they choose to make their creativity muscle/skill level better, stronger and more refined.
Within the creative thinking process lies the power to make transformation happen. You may make objects, sounds, feelings, and changes in habits (your own and others). Creativity when coupled with the discipline of the process can change everything.