Creativity is Healthy Fun!

I've been thinking about how much creativity surrounds us as kids and how much we embrace it growing up. We not only color with crayons, but we melt them in the driveway to see what happens.

But as the older us appears, these experiments become lost in the world of jobs and mortgages. We are no longer the demon girl in braids and bows with our box of crayolas, but the ice prince or princess in our four-door sedan with our pennies, dimes, and nickels sorted out in our change holder.

This summer, I did a lot of physical outside stuff-- mountain biking, camping, hiking, gardening, kayaking, flipping over while kayaking, swimming--and it's been harder to get back into writing this fall. I think this happens with our creativity as we grow up, we forget to use it. We begin to buy what's in-style to fit in. We look, speak, move like the people around us. We forgot to practice our creativity, but instead life becomes about fitting in, being liked, getting a job, paying bills. Not being ourselves, but being like everyone else.

For the last 7 years, I've been on a different path and sometimes it's hard. I don't have the standard line to tell people when they ask what I do. If you ask what I do, please be ready to spend at least 5 minutes with me to go deeper, because I don't have a one sentence summary. I'm not sure I ever will.

So in certain ways, I'm very creative, but in other ways, color me vanilla. I am thinking about how to look at the world differently to find and follow my own vision of what's right. To make my own path, not follow a path. And to make sure I'm thinking for myself and not just going along with the crowd.

And this is where my writing practice comes in, when I'm not writing, I tend to lose that creative part that I value so highly. I not only don't experiment with words, but I don't experiment with life.

Writing is Healthy Fun, the ad should say. Any time of creating. We become small gods when we bring something new into the world. So today, I'm asking myself how I fit in and how I don't and to make sure my choices are intentional and not just because I wasn't paying attention. What can you notice today that you haven't before?

Here's mine--

While brushing my teeth, I realized Tartar control can be RatRat control if you read "tartar" backwards. It's small, but it made my morning routine slightly more interesting and fresh today.

What can you see differently in the world today?

* * *