TOW: Creativity

You know, my new job requires me to be creative at work.  And by creative, I mean really creative.  I come up with themes to marketing campaigns, I do graphic design, recently I've become somewhat of a no-name Youtube star for the videos I'm creating , and I edit everything, do all the technical side of things, and tell a story with pictures, videos and words.  And I do it all several times a week.

What I realize from doing this is that creativity is very much like a muscle.  If you over-exert it, you'll strain or even injure you're ability to be creative.  This is essentially every hipster-esque art piece that was trying so hard to be something, it went full circle and went back to sucking.  Maybe it could have been really 'real' or 'moving' had it not included every artist reference to everything and its non-committal boyfriend.  But, like most works of art, it's trying to say too much, trying to be too much, trying to be 'the artist' before the art.  Works of art like this are strained.  It's not a healthy piece of art.  It's just as unpleasant as watching a bodybuilder lift his max weight.  It's all grunt-face and quivering muscles that can barely hold up 350 pounds.

But if you don't exercise you're creativity, you'll lose it.  You will be sluggish, unaware, unfeeling to the world around you.  You become a consumer, instead of a maker.  It's good to consume art and culture, but it's important to make things, to be, to live in the moment that is the 'artist's moment.'  It's good to exercise your creativity.  It keeps you mentally strong, awake, and feeling good about yourself.

I have been working on a couple projects that are taking a lot of my time, and some days I don't have the creativity, the will power, nor the sleep allowance that allows me to create anything of value.  Because creativity requires that I have some kind of energy to give, to infuse into my activities, and when I come home tired or drained, there's not a lot to give.  The creative spirit requires nearly boundless energy, drawing from that inner well that always replenishes itself as long as you save time for introspection, reflection, and productive creative activity.

Create, do, be.  Unless you are satisfied with a creative piece, it doesn't matter what other people think.  You have an obligation to yourself to put that energy in you, in things in the world until they make you smile, until they make you happy, and that you can see in the world, things in yourself that you've always wanted to share.  Because the world we live in, the world of constant, nearly suffocating connection, demands of us that we share only the best of ourselves.  The masters of our world are always the ones that are creating the content in it, the sights, the sounds the smells, the feelings.  It's up to us to curate that content, and to reflect something of ourselves onto the world that can make others know us for who we really are.  That's creativity.