DAY ONE

So here we are, the first day of the rest of my creative life. Hopefully yours too.

I've started this personal blog in order to chronicle my regular attempts to be more actively creative. The keyword here is active, by which I mean regular, by which I mean, or at least, hope daily. My intention is to note, sometimes briefly, sometimes at length, my encounters with this thing called creativity and in so doing perhaps glean some insights into my own thought processes and motivations, which may in turn help you reflect on yours. 

Rock Display Found on Local Footpath

I have been fascinated by creativity as an intellectual concept for many years. I used to be in management, and then consultancy and one reason for my interest was that I wanted to make work more fun, more enjoyable, and simply more interesting for me, my staff, and my clients. 

 

In all honesty I mostly failed in this ambition. There were times when perhaps I was over ambitious about this, or misjudged the situation, or my timing was off, but in truth I had to learn to accept there are an awful lot of people who by personality or because it was dunned into them by teachers, parents or other experiences are quite happy choosing not to be creative, thank you very much.

It should be clear I'm taking a broad view of creativity here and it includes though does not depend on the idea of innovation. But I want to stress now that this is not a management blog and I won't be approaching creativity from that angle. The intellectual analysis of creativity and schematic descriptions of how to understand, encourage, enable and facilitate the same are interesting, but also a bit dry for my taste nowadays. In particular they don't sufficiently scratch the itches that concern me now: emotion and spontaneity.

 

The more interesting part of being creative - which to enter another caveat does not have to mean or even imply being 'original' or 'arty' - is about the emotional engagement, the sparks of joy and insight into the world and maybe into oneself; the gentle delights and pleasures of being absorbed in an activity for a sustained period, (call it flow or mindfulness if you want to); the doubts and barriers, both real, imagined, and invented that get in the way. 

I have known all of those feelings in brief spurts, momentarily, sporadically, enough to get a taste for them, but what I haven't allowed myself to experience is a sustained and committed attempt at anything of substance. I'm a dabbler when it comes to creative efforts, and a dreamer, a planner, a coward, and an intellectualiser. Anything but a doer.

So that's what this blog is really about, my attempt to commit myself to a sustained period - every day for one year is the target - to a range of creative activities and write up the trials and tribulations experienced in the process. Commitment to this blog is the first of these, and I'm happy to report that so far it's all going swimmingly!

 

So what should you expect from future postings?         

My aim with the blog is to be as spontaneous as I can be, to respond directly to events day by day as they happen, rather than spend ages planning outlines or teasing out some complex idea. This is a bit of a departure for me and something of a commitment in itself. I also expect I will be providing links to ideas and resources that interest me and seem relevant from time to time, but I promise you this: there will be no inspirational quotes.

 

What am I up to at the moment, creatively speaking?

Outside of the blog I'm working on a novel (call me Mr. Cliché, no, that isn't the title), which I've been dabbling at for about a century, and from time to time I pick up a pair of knitting needles or make something from wood. I also like to bake and do interesting things in the kitchen, and I'm a dab hand at the DIY when I can be bothered. Finally I have a source of endless disappointment called a digital camera which I take seriously but which never seems to reciprocate - the results mock me, constantly.

And that's about it on the creative front.

 

Did anyone baulk at the idea of DIY? What if I had included tinkering with engines as well? Or coding? Or being a flaneur? 

Any and all of these would fall under my definition, if not yours, and that's OK. We are all free to be personally creative about what we consider to be personally creative. The important thing as far as I'm concerned is that it matters to you, that you engage with it, whatever it is, and that you bring something of yourself to it be that in the choice of what you do or make, or the way in which you do it. 

 

So that's day one. 

 

Onwards...