On creativity and art - #2.
"You never actually arrive anywhere" - Jaime Mandelbaum
It was the last day in Turkey, and tomorrow the new everyday working life is about to begin. It still fascinates me how corporate people are used to this: you work 40 hours a week in an office for the whole year to enjoy two weeks of obsessive relaxation twice a year. A fair trade-off, isn’t it? As a former freelancer who had no place-bonded limitations, I’m still getting used to this concept. I hope, time will help. I’ve grown to miss my 9-5 job in just two weeks of vacation, seems like I’m on the right track.
So, this week I’ve been thinking about creativity, and it happened to be a lot. Over the last year, I’ve realized that there’s nothing more important for me than art and writing. I believe that creative processes are extremely important since our soul realizes itself in the world through them. Through creative activities, we connect with the essence of being, and for me, that is the priority. I’ve been thinking about how creativity, creation and art itself speak from our deepest selves, how it highlights aspects that are the most important for us, and how it helps us to work our wounds through and heal ourselves. I’ve been thinking about the way it all interconnects inside of us to later manifest itself in the world. It led me to a few minor conclusions:
1. There are no talents.
I believe talents were invented to justify inactivity and poor self-esteem, to excuse not believing in oneself. I’ve been there: you get an idea, you start developing it, and with the very first obstacle, you realize that it’s all faulty because you are lacking this magical thing, a talent. Guess it’s time to quit everything and forget you’ve ever tried the thing.
What we suppose to be a talent, truly, is a baby of being inclined towards something and putting time and effort into it over long periods of time. When people tell me I’m talented, I wish they could read something I wrote fourteen years ago in the very beginning. Those people would take their words back, for sure. The only thing is that I’ve been doing it for fourteen years and I loved every phase of it. That’s why it sometimes goes smoothly now and brings enjoyment not only to me but also to someone else. Pick up a thing you love, no matter how bad you are at it, and just build consistency over time. Give it your mental energy and focus, set goals and routines, just make it a regular part of your life, and you will be a happy talent owner over a not-so-long period.
2. Input leads to output.
You can’t create a missile from a scratch. You need to collect information and knowledge from people who explored missile-building subjects before you and left you some notes and conclusions. Yes, most art is different from missile-building, but the principle stays: you just pile your ideas up on something created prior. It is such a banal idea if you are used to it, but very often creative people think that they have to be a hundred per cent original, and that is a recipe for failure. You don’t want to copy and paste and have a bunch of legal issues with other creators. You just need to get inspired. And for that, you need to be curious: to collect personal experience through travelling, meeting people, doing sports, and solving issues; through reading all kinds of books and not only non-fictional ones; through watching movies, series, cartoons, and documentaries; through listening to all different kinds of music; through playing videogames. No need to do it all at once, of course, but you need to provide yourself with a flow of information, ideally, from a field you want to advance in. This way you get ideas, this way you get inspired.
3. You don’t need a lot of time for it.
You just need good quality time and focused time. The creative process is always there, in the background, and the best way to make it efficient is to give yourself plenty of time when your mind can just wander around. It happens when you are on a walk with no headphones, doing yoga or taking a long shower. We all know that our mind requires these times of seemingly not being occupied with anything, but truly we rarely provide ourselves with it. The first step would be to start with these activities. And then, after they are included in everyday life, give yourself limited amounts of time to work on creative projects. An hour a day, for example. Or just an hour on Sunday, whatever your schedule allows. But it should be short and isolated from all other stimuli. Just an hour of hard-core focus on executing the ideas you’ve got from the unfocused periods of time can make a significant difference. Just try it, and you will see! :)
This week I watched a movie called “The grandmaster”, and I highly recommend it if the non-mass market cinema doesn’t scare you away. This one is from Wong Kar-wai, one of my favourite directors. It is about kung-fu, a subject that I’m interested in for years, and my favourite actors are in it, but I got taken by a different idea. The idea of living through art, breathing art, and being art. Kung-fu was a cornerstone of the personalities of those masters depicted in the movie, and they were carrying it through life. No matter what, their art was there with them. It wasn’t for money, it wasn’t for security, rather the opposite. And I loved this concept. You don’t do it for any of above mentioned. You just do it because that’s what you should do, and you know it. No matter what, it is with you, the same way the starry heavens are above you and the moral law is within you.
For me, art is not something you can narrowly define as painting or drawing or writing or making movies. Art is anything and everything that is being created. So, there are no limits. How would you define art for yourself and what is your area of being creative in life? Is there any? Let me know in any language you’re comfortable with :)
See you soon,
Caroline
