Balanced creativity

Being creative stimulates our minds, but can also be relaxing and even meditative.

We have become so used to just buying what we want to be distracted from the stresses of our lives that we do not notice that instead of the distractions relieving us, they are just adding to our stress. Paying others to create our distractions is not doing it for us any more, so we may just need to find something to create that actually helps us to relax. Many have hobbies, but often they are simply collecting a bunch of ready-made products with the only skill we have picked up being to select from a catalogue. Of course, we can be creative in how we arrange and present them.

Creating is a multi-stage process that involves conceptualising what to make, determining the materials or medium to use to do that, how to construct its parts, and how to make it all come together. It takes time and requires us to appreciate what it takes to transform raw ideas into something that transcends them. We become part of the process of life through our efforts to transform what we started with into something new. We have added to the collective output of humanity with something we have fashioned out of an idea in our minds into the physical.

While the work we do to make our living can be creative, there is often a lot of pressure to make our output timely, which builds up a lot of stress but also takes us away from getting the benefits of the creative process itself. The output becomes the goals not the doing. This often results in far less satisfaction, especially if we were forced to cut corners due to time constraints, or simply not being allowed to have much input into how we contribute. We often do not feel the sort of satisfaction that we get when we control the whole process. We need to have our own creative outlet.

Of course, while we could create our own versions of what we create at work, we really want to do something different that does not remind us of the stress of our jobs and all the often toxic workplace politics that go into it. We want to be free of the constraints that only serve to stress us, so we need to make something that puts us in a separate head-space from where we normally operate, just so we can feel the sense of freedom allowed to us when we can choose and control the whole of what we do.

That does not mean there are not constraints, as making anything physical has intrinsic limitations, but it is that we are getting to choose what we want to be limited by, not some manager or marketing executive. We may want to design a product that we might want to sell to offer for free, and while it may have functionality limits defined by its intended use, it is not subject to the often arbitrary constraints imposed by development time limits or functionality rollout schedules that guarantee that future versions will be needed.

What we create does not even need to be useful to others, as it is for us to be connected to the flow of creative life. We may feel that we want to make something that others can get benefit from, as that can validate that we are actually useful, as opposed to what we may consider as our bullshit days jobs. And this brings up about where our personal creative endeavours fit in with the context of the rest of our lives. While we may be subconsciously drawn to particular creative endeavours, they may actually compliment what we do at other times.

For example, if our work involves activities that are short in nature, like serving takeaway food, then our leisure activities will tend to involve a longer timeframe for us to feel satisfied with them. As consumers, we may then choose to play multi-level games that take days to conquer. The creative alternative may be to build a piece of intricate furniture that similarly involves days. Conversely, if our day job is longer-term activities, like building intricate furniture, our personal creative outlet may be to write articles for our website, each involving only hours.

If our day job involves a lot of intense physical activity, we may want our creative outlet to be more centred upon stretching our thinking. This is what balanced creativity is about; doing something that stretches another part of our being than what we normally do elsewhere, thereby making us feel more whole and complete. We can then be more in balance within ourselves, and thus feel more in control of our lives.