I’ve been wanting to write about creativity, the natural handoff from free will.  But I haven’t felt inspired.  It’s really so interesting how our perceptions and preconceptions become self-fulfilling prophecies.

As with many other things, I struggle with the concept of creativity.  I tend to view myself as a nerd with good execution capabilities but not necessarily creative.  Of course that’s a destructive self-image.  And it’s not even true.  I have plenty of evidence to show myself that maybe I am in fact “creative”.  The very act of writing this blog is an act of creativity.  Also, in my business, I’m told I’m creative on my “deals”.  The way I set up my daily life is creative.

I think my feelings of low creative self worth come from infancy and have to do with music.  I grew up in a household where everybody was brilliant and played music pretty well.  Particularly, one of my brothers is a very decent pianist with a long composing history.  It was a tough standard to live up to and I think I just let my musical creative drive atrophy.  It’s a pity since I suffer the consequences today.  I would love to compose music, but I don’t.  I would love to play an instrument, but I get bored with them because I get into repetitive ruts and just drop them.  I had the most exciting guitar teacher recently for about two years, but I just didn’t keep up with it.  Today I barely practice.

But the reality is that there is only so much time and energy to go around in our lives and we make choices.  Maybe one day I will allocate enough time to musical endeavors and I’ll enjoy it.  In the meantime, I can bask in the belief that as a music lover, there is so much wonderful music to be heard out there, why pollute the airwaves with my own mediocre attempts?

About a year ago I read an endearing book by a guy named Gary Marcus describing his quest to learn to play the guitar as an adult: Guitar Zero.  It is actually a story of hope for anyone learning a new discipline late in life.  One of his observations, which can be seen in other contexts, is that in order to master a discipline, it takes 10,000 hours of practice.  Ouch.  That’s a long time.  But it does bring up an interesting point about creativity.  Is creativity primarily a state of inspiration or is it methodical progressive toil?  Is it Mozart composing as if taking  dictation straight from above, or Beethoven laboriously and methodically writing down ideas in his notebook to be magnificently developed later?  Maybe it’s both.

Going back to Mary Poppins and the Akashic Field, I believe that our feelings and ideas come from “above” and we just tune into them. We’re more accessing “the internet of spirit” than our own “cerebral hard drives”. So, the more connected to spirit, the clearer the channel, the more coming down. But just “downloading” is useless unless methodically organized, presented, executed.

So what does creativity apply to?  Is it mainly an artistic endeavor?  Or is it something we engage in every time we exercise our free will?

We “create” every time we speak and act. Every time we make a decision. Creativity defines our daily way of life.  So creativity is intertwined with decision-making.  Our choices are rarely binary but rather occupy a spectrum of possibilities.  They are also heavily influenced by our own history, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

The most important decisions we make, where we really get to express our creativity, revolve around who we “want to be”.  A very dear friend of mine (who has already been featured several times in my writings!!) sits down at the beginning of each year and instead of making “new year’s resolutions”, she writes down who she wants to be or maybe even more precisely, how she wants to be.  She starts every line with an “I am” statement that does not center on her status or imperfection but rather the ideal to which she aspires.  I am in awe by this concept and find it the epitome of personal creativity.  These are guideposts for her daily behavior, a compass, a moral code.

Creativity and decision-making are subject to Rule No. 1 of Economics: scarce resources.  Making decisions consumes energy so there’s only so many of them we can make during any given span of time.  Here’s an interesting article on this topic: Tough Choices.  I have experienced this very first hand with alcohol.  When I drank wine, I didn’t make a decision, I just ordered it at lunch and had it with dinner at home.  But that wasn’t good for my liver, my psoriasis, my job or my concentration.  When I scaled back and went for the 2-3 drinks per week, I suffered.  It was a nightmare.  I had to make a decision every time and keep track of my consumption mentally.  But then when I decided to drop it altogether, it became a lot easier.  The decision had been made, it was prepackaged and it consumed no energy.

We humans ultimately love routines and traditions, because they bring us back to a place where we don’t have to consume energy because the decisions are prepackaged (like turkey on Thanksgiving).  But then, this should liberate us to spend mental energy on making other decisions.  That creates white space that gives us the opportunity to create otherwise.

Bottom line, with free will, we have the opportunity to create the story of who we are every day.  We have finite resources to create, so we can prepackage our decisions for all our basics, then follow our own traditions and routines, and spend the creative energy to be who we want to be every day.

As a companion to this blog, I will be recording a guided meditation to connect with the purple energy of creativity through our third eye.  Holding onto an amethyst quartz during meditation, even better.