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!