Hard to Live With!

I encourage you to see your own creative endeavors 
as valuable in and of themselves.

Creative people can be difficult to live with.

I love to crochet in different stitches, patterns and color combinations that I create.  So I volunteered to make baby blankets for a local hospital.  The free yarn was provided in every color imaginable, and I was in crochet-heaven.  That is until the volunteer director started imposing dimension, style, and color rules on our creations.

After several months of trying to comply, I lost interest and quit.

Typical temperamental artist, right?  When my creative freedom was limited, it became work.  When it became unpaid work, I lost interest.  But why?

Free creative expression engenders its own energy, which fuels further creative expression. 

Is this selfish?  My way or the highway?

My original purpose was to express myself creatively – as a counterbalance to my day job. This creativity put a spark of energy back into my life. 

Creative expression, -- in and for itself – is a positive good for the person and for his society.  If every creative endeavor becomes subservient to business goals, political goals, or even religious goals, then it ceases to be creative.  Then the creative person feels stifled and frustrated and in the long run his society is deprived.  A people who have ceased to value true and free creative expression are a people with a shriveled and dying culture.

But we will not dwell on that.  This blog is about encouragement!

I encourage you to see your own creative endeavors as valuable in and of themselves.  

Do not always measure them by how much money they bring you, or even by how much they seem to help someone else in the short term.  Be “selfish” in a very wise way.  Value creativity and it will feed your soul.  If your soul is nourished, you will be better able – in the long term – to both support yourself and to help others.

My mother used to tell me, while watching me race around raising four young children:

“Someday, when you have more leisure, you are going to write.”  

I’m sure I rolled my eyes at her!  My life circumstances had so squelched my creative energy that I didn’t even believe it existed.

But -- oh the wisdom of mothers -- she was right!

They're a Different Breed!

The Problem With Creativity

Some people seem to ooze creativity.  They paint in a studio, or they create art from beautiful photos they snap.  Maybe they publish books, or compose and record music.  They seem to be a different “breed” with a gene the rest of us mortals are missing.

But I don’t believe that is so.  I believe that when God “created man in his own image,” that meant he endowed him with the ability to be creative, as He is creative.  Our God is also called Creator because He created ALL things.  “The world was made through him, and without him was not anything made that has been made.”  So why do we see such differences in people regarding creativity?

The ability to create, as well as every other human trait, is found in varying intensity and with differing expression.  People have different personalities as well as different levels of creativity, and this causes some to pursue creative expression as though they would die without it, while others dabble in creative pursuits as a hobby.  In addition,  people are born into varying circumstances with widely different opportunities.  Some are children of wealth with higher education, and an independent means of support. Others must eke out a living through daily physical labor, with little time or energy left for anything but survival.

Considering all these variables, it is no wonder we see such a distinction between persons who pursue a highly creative life and those who do not.

Despite my previous statement that all people are born with creative capacity, I am going to talk about “creative people” as those who actively pursue the shaping of things or ideas into new forms with 50% or more of their time and effort.  These people can encounter some very particular problems in life.  One of these is the insistence on being independent.

Everyone in the sphere of business, religion, politics and other earthly pursuits knows that collaboration is the key to success and progress.  Synergy is the fact that the whole is more than the sum of its parts in any group effort.  In politics you must go along to get along.  In the church,  a group of members is a faith community – with webs of positive interactions and interdependencies.  This is normal and beneficial.

The creative person marches to the beat of an entirely different drummer.

This is important to understand if you yourself are highly creative, or if you are the teacher or mentor of others.

What is this “problem” of creativity?  If you think about it for a moment, it makes perfect sense that in order to create something, you must first deconstruct and then reassemble your chosen medium in a way that no one has ever thought of before.  No one else can tell you how to do this.  It comes from within yourself and is accompanied by an independent, almost arrogant, sense that 

“This is the right way.  Do this.” 

For example, when a poet works with words, he “uses” various words, sounds and meanings – rearranging them in a new way which strikes a chord in the human heart that is fresh.  It would not be a new creation, but rather a tired copy, if the poet used only clichés from what others had done, or if he was directed and censored by another.

It is obvious, then, why highly creative people are often seen as stubborn, arrogant, opinionated, fiercely independent, and even unbendable.  This quality goes with the territory of creating something that never previously existed.

Edison, Einstein, and Van Gogh may have been impossible 

to live with -- but where would we be without them!