Meditating on creativity
I started meditating three days ago.
I've always dabbled somewhat in it and been fascinated by it when I didn't meditate. Somehow I never made the time but I'm hopeful that this time, it will stick. I decided to make this change because recently, I've started realizing that somewhere along the way of life I lost the connection to my creative self. I'm hopeful that sitting quietly in meditation is at least part of the way back to wholeness. Since having my daughter a year and a half ago, the question of HOW to be in the world have become more urgent. Because, as I'm sure most people with children have discovered, being a parent is not just a one way transmission of knowledge from me to my child but it is a conversation between the two of us. While I am setting boundaries, giving her love, and teaching her about some concrete aspects of the world, she is simultaneously showing me new ways of seeing the world I had forgotten about or had never observed before. Interacting with her is teaching me about myself and illuminating the parts of myself I have put on autopilot. My creativity is one of the things that I let atrophy and I filled that void with consumption - of food, of social media, of news and political outrage, of other people's creative endeavors.
Because I think that creativity is part of our evolutionary legacy and critical to living well as a human, it bothers me that I have neglected my connection to inspiration. Watching my daughter blossom into awareness of the world around her is helping me to rediscover my sense of wonder. I believe that inspiration and creativity grow out of that sense of wonder; a sense that all too often we have been socialized to eclipse with ironic detachment. It wasn't "cool" in my generation (very early Millennial/late Gen X) to care too much or try too hard. As a consequence (of this and other things), I muted all my enthusiasm and curiosity. I abandoned anything that required too much effort or that I was "bad" at doing.
A couple of months ago, I read the book Big Magic (which is amazing, and which everyone should read), and Elizabeth Gilbert makes a passionate case that all people are inherently creative and we should embrace and cultivate curiosity, wonder, and creativity without regard for what others might say, or how marketable our creative endeavors are. Without caring how good or skilled they might be. Today, as I sat in meditation, I realized that I was already spinning out fantasies of how I could externalize this internal practice. I envisioned the YouTube video I could make, the pithy Facebook status updates I could write. I realized that was part of the problem with all my creative endeavors. I was approaching them from the perspective of how they would look from the outside. I wasn't engaging in activities just for the experience itself, but for the performative value of the experience. Ironically, this drove me to write here, in my blog (har har).
I don't know how to escape this kind of thinking and being except perhaps through constant practice of just doing things that seem fun and creative. I'm not sure how to get past the performative feeling of my life ... I think that is something that requires more examination. Its certainly a habit of mind that I have been inadvertently cultivating for years. That kind of habit doesn't break under a few days of meditation so I just have to be patient and diligent.
I've always dabbled somewhat in it and been fascinated by it when I didn't meditate. Somehow I never made the time but I'm hopeful that this time, it will stick. I decided to make this change because recently, I've started realizing that somewhere along the way of life I lost the connection to my creative self. I'm hopeful that sitting quietly in meditation is at least part of the way back to wholeness. Since having my daughter a year and a half ago, the question of HOW to be in the world have become more urgent. Because, as I'm sure most people with children have discovered, being a parent is not just a one way transmission of knowledge from me to my child but it is a conversation between the two of us. While I am setting boundaries, giving her love, and teaching her about some concrete aspects of the world, she is simultaneously showing me new ways of seeing the world I had forgotten about or had never observed before. Interacting with her is teaching me about myself and illuminating the parts of myself I have put on autopilot. My creativity is one of the things that I let atrophy and I filled that void with consumption - of food, of social media, of news and political outrage, of other people's creative endeavors.
Because I think that creativity is part of our evolutionary legacy and critical to living well as a human, it bothers me that I have neglected my connection to inspiration. Watching my daughter blossom into awareness of the world around her is helping me to rediscover my sense of wonder. I believe that inspiration and creativity grow out of that sense of wonder; a sense that all too often we have been socialized to eclipse with ironic detachment. It wasn't "cool" in my generation (very early Millennial/late Gen X) to care too much or try too hard. As a consequence (of this and other things), I muted all my enthusiasm and curiosity. I abandoned anything that required too much effort or that I was "bad" at doing.
A couple of months ago, I read the book Big Magic (which is amazing, and which everyone should read), and Elizabeth Gilbert makes a passionate case that all people are inherently creative and we should embrace and cultivate curiosity, wonder, and creativity without regard for what others might say, or how marketable our creative endeavors are. Without caring how good or skilled they might be. Today, as I sat in meditation, I realized that I was already spinning out fantasies of how I could externalize this internal practice. I envisioned the YouTube video I could make, the pithy Facebook status updates I could write. I realized that was part of the problem with all my creative endeavors. I was approaching them from the perspective of how they would look from the outside. I wasn't engaging in activities just for the experience itself, but for the performative value of the experience. Ironically, this drove me to write here, in my blog (har har).
I don't know how to escape this kind of thinking and being except perhaps through constant practice of just doing things that seem fun and creative. I'm not sure how to get past the performative feeling of my life ... I think that is something that requires more examination. Its certainly a habit of mind that I have been inadvertently cultivating for years. That kind of habit doesn't break under a few days of meditation so I just have to be patient and diligent.
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