Time to Create

There are times in your life when creativity is key, as a child you are praised to do your best, to imagine things, to create things. However as life goes on that is suppressed, reality and seriousness become the key. The vibrant imagination of your childhood is replaced, with cold facts and logical reasoning. Not for all but for some, and not for all for anyone. We all still hold a piece of this, that is what happens when you watch a movie, see a drawing, hear a music piece and feel inspired. When you hear news of some team beating 8000:1 odds. You feel a sense of pride, a sense of awe. You sit down at your computer with the notion to write something of your own, or perhaps it is naught but a fleeting thought that is carried off with the wind. Whatever the case is, that is your inner artist screaming, pleading to come out. To fill the world with its ideas. However we dilute this urge, thoughts of food, games, or work that needs to be done wash away this feeling. Then it is gone, gone again until the next muse appears. But will this one be enough to overpower the thought of wanting a cheeseburger? In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape letters he teeters with the idea the demons can interject thoughts into us. For example, if you were about to help an elderly lady across the street, but you remember you left your stove at home on. Trivial thoughts like this can make us veer away from pious, moral goals we set. This is the same for the expression of ourselves. We let tiny thoughts steer us away from writing that story we have always wanted to write or create that movie script we had always been thinking about. We stop, we let life move on, our ideas to vanish.
Occasionally we sit down, we put our thoughts to action and we write, we draw, we create. If we persist and put pen to paper, it becomes exhausting. Every letter is paramount to climbing Mt. Everest, your body becomes worn out and you want to stop. To create is soul-wrenching, and that is what your mind latches onto. It sees this “anguish” as torture akin to working out, doing manual labor. It sees it as a chore. So every time you sit down to create again, your brain reminds of you of this, pleads with you to stop. However as you all are already saying it doesn’t see the whole picture.
When we finish a piece of art we regard it with absolute fondness, sure we critique and harp on what we did wrong, but ultimately we love our own creations. People 20,30, 40 years down the line can still remember fondly, the poems they wrote, the songs they crafted. Instead of treating it as a series of strenuous tasks they see it as a whole, even if the project wasn’t finished. They see these as things they wish the could still emulate, relics of a golden age of themselves. Often they make excuses why they could never do that again, why it just isn’t possible they are too busy. Pink Floyd’s Time puts it best, “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time, plans that either have come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines”. We fight, delay, and neglect our inner artists. Don’t let your apathy win, don’t walk away from your drive. Or, ten, twenty, thirty years from now you will be filled with nothing, and regret.