So often we think of a creative life as a lifestyle we choose or a thing that we do. Some people talk about it as if creativity is like a faucet they can turn on and off at will like they would for washing dishes. It’s just one more thing to add into the accumulated doing which constitutes a life. It’s like an adult version of art class. You bring out all the supplies for the project, work on it, then put them all away again. Neat and tidy. But life is rarely neat and tidy. Creating rarely stays within the lines. Unless we’re very careful, the process of creating can bleed out into other areas of our life.
Creating doesn’t just have to do with art. It isn’t just for projects. It’s got names like life hacking and passion and spiritual path. Creating is what we do when we make choices for ourselves to go this way vs. that. It is what we are doing when we decide to be imminently practical or to follow our intuition. It is what we are doing when we renovate a house, paint a room, plan a vacation, plant a garden, decide what to do with the weekend, buy a flat, cook a meal and so much more. Yet while we’re focused on the end product, often the short and sometimes the medium term results, we can be willfully ignorant of the fact that we are also a product of all this creative effort. While we are creating things week-in-week-out we are at the same time being created. The path we choose creates us as surely as we create the path we walk.
This means that living creatively is not a lifestyle, it is life itself. With each action and choice we make we are being created. We are choosing how much joy and frivolity, play and fun are added into the mix, how much work and how much spirituality, whether or not those two ingredients are aligned or even the same thing or not, and how much living is involved in all of our doing. We are co-creating our lives within the interconnected universe. Within that we may create art, beauty, music, dance, pleasure, and all of the necessarily unproductive things which make life worth living.
