Creativity thrives on an openness and innocence (or perhaps wilful ignorance), a trust in the unknown and a delightful anticipation of the unexpected. It calls for a certain level of restriction, pressure or limitation: a time constraint, a budget limit, an equipment or materials limit, inexperience, weather conditions, client preferences, Mercury or Mars in retrograde, etc.
We are sustained by injections of randomness and surprise. We need to be challenged and stretched, terrified and excited. To channel what is most authentic of our truth requires nothing less than the rawest of moments and the intrepid spirit to match it.
Everyone has their own variation of this uncomfortable cliff’s edge to step up to, so don’t waste your time in comparison or competition. Live and embody your story.
Our signature, our style, is borne of and through the process of honing artistic skills, delving into and acquiring a broad range of seemingly unrelated skills, countless mistakes, failures, and the obvious: practice. We learn self-trust and inherit reliability through these emergent strengths and hard-earned confidence.
It should be no surprise, then, that our relationships are very much brought into the same arena, yet rarely get a small fraction of the same effort, patience, persistence, passion, energy, openness, innocence, daring and practice.
And maybe they needn’t, for what you value is what you choose to value — and this will change and evolve as you do; conformity to cultural norms are a terribly stressful and a largely disingenuous way to live.
Be real. Be present. Be consistent. Dabbling in the arts and in your interpersonal life offers you only what is on the surface… and a lot of that is made up.
Dive in.
Solvitur ambulando