The Importance of Loosening Your Grip
Creativity seems like something we aren’t holding on to - people think it comes to us as some kind of divine intervention, a lightbulb or Newton’s apple. People think it’s written within us, and you either have it or you don’t. But all of us have inventiveness and creativity, we all need it to navigate our daily lives. Some people use their creativity to propel their careers, or to solve problems within them. Some people’s creativity comes out as just following some joy.
But when you’re attuned to your creativity, and you rely on it for your job, you do end up holding it tightly. Creativity is a wild creature, complexly made from a hundred different things, constant and changing, and we try and hold it, wriggling around in our hands like a trapped mouse, and we try and force it to do our bidding. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t comply.
Here’s a reminder to loosen your grip. Not on reality, or life, but on your creativity. Do not force yourself to make, do not force yourself to realise your ideas and thoughts into something.
Tend to other gardens. Organisation, money-making, admin, health, buying food - the hygiene of existence. Ban yourself from making, whilst you dedicate yourself wholly and fully to The Other Things.
Sometimes, this process feels like tightening instead of loosening. People perceive creativity to be loose and free, wild and magical. Responsibilities and hoovering feel rigid and one-directional, and problems solved via emails or sums don’t feel like an expression of our soul, or a worthy use of our time. But all parts of life are necessary, just like the different parts of you that deal with sums, hoovering, joy, art - and they are all connected.
When you focus on The Other Things, creativity starts to breathe. Soon, you begin to notice beauty and joy in things you walked past before - a perfectly crushed can, a hole in a fence. You start to remember a song, the scent of blossom from a summer past, recall a friend you haven’t seen in a while. Your creativity starts to escape from between your fingers, whilst you aren’t looking. A craving will begin to grow within you. An ache, a pull to make again. It’s not a should or a have-to; it’s not even a want or a need. It is a compulsion, cell-deep and time-true.
Inspiration comes in many forms.
Whilst your back was turned, ideas that felt separate and a great many miles apart have grown closer. Thoughts and ideas that were a great many jumbled strings begin to unravel, make sense. Sometimes they effortlessly, deftly start to fall together, each thread falling into a place that seems so obvious, you wonder why you never realised to knit the many parts together before. And just like that, you are back at the loom to creativity, taking each weft and warp and weaving them into something new, something exciting, and something uniquely yours. Sure, you might fuck it up. It might not fit, it might fall apart, it might be worked and reworked again and again. But if you give yourself some distance, some looseness you’ll be refreshed and ready to work another day at the ongoing tapestry of your soul.
As my friend says - “I’m trying not to punish myself as an artist…writing down ideas is enough, or collecting inspiration...Maybe just seeing a bad tattoo of Ian Wright is enough for a Monday.”
Photo by 45RPM.
