Thoughts on Creativity

This topic has been on my mind a bit lately but it was a post by a friend (that I’ve never met but know through my friends Marc & Eliana), Chel, yesterday that really got me going even more on it.

Hiking on the Appalachian Trail for five months will really set your priorities straight. There is tons of time to think and well, when your Google Reader backs up and you cannot possibly keep up, hitting “Mark All Read” is the thing to do. And it didn’t hurt. It actually let me realize that many of the blogs I were reading had slowly gotten off track from either their original intent or my original intent for reading them. Why? Sometimes I felt like there was too much creative drama, the “woe is me, I am never going to make money at my art, or what should I do, how do I get started, I want to do this and this and this but don’t have time”. And honestly, when one person gets started it seems to spread throughout the internet. It just became too much.

Part of it stems from a comparison of yourself creatively to someone else you want to emulate or has a hobby/profession you wish to have. These are the people who seem to have it all, either the 2.5 kids, dog, nice house, perfectly cozy working at home, or the single gal who lives it up and landed a cool gig working for a super awesome creative company (be it scrapbooking, art, crochet, photography, just pick a company and insert it here). And here you are working a 9-5 job in a company you may or may not like and can only work on projects on the weekend, but boy do you want to bake this, sew that, write handy dandy thank you cards to everyone for all the gifts you get at holidays….and it becomes stressful.

It also seemed in the blogging world if you were to be anybody creative and in the know you had to either start some sort of e-book or online workshop. There are many success stories with both of these and I applaud everyone who can do it, but why must we (or me?) feel like that should be our goal at the end of the day too? How could we all possibly keep up with doing our creative outlet and meanwhile somehow manage a workshop or an e-book or eww, the dreaded blog that decides to take up sponsors. Really? I do not want to read about your giveaways or more about the sponsors on your site. Sure, it might be a creative sponsor but it’s still advertising and I don’t want to see it. I have dropped many famous creative bloggers because of this, sometimes a bit guiltily because they were such good writers in the beginning.

So, what am I trying to get at? You can’t do everything and be successful at each thing. I know, I’ve tried. I still have half made crochet socks that I was going to have done for Fall. I might be lucky to finish them by Christmas. That’s ok. I am not going to be the crochet guru I thought I might be a few years ago when I took up crochet. Scrapbooking? Out the window. I might play with paper again one day for some small project, but gone are the days that I thought maybe I’d ‘make it’ in the scrapbooking world. Art? This one is something still on the burner, simmering in the background. It’s something I will be doing for myself and for family and perhaps one day my art will be known, but it doesn’t matter to me right now. But, photography, oh photography. That has become my passion and I think Chris and I are on the right track for sharing our work with the world. Will we get rich? Probably not unless Oprah tells the world how awesome we are. But, we’ll have fun and enjoy doing it and getting better at our craft.

I guess the overall point is, stop taking creativity so seriously and just go ‘be’. Stop thinking about it so hard and go after what you really want and give the smaller things up for a rainy day or when you are actually in the right path for it.

That’s my very rambling message today.