rubyinthedust:

We are all born creative, curious, and hungry to explore the world around and within us. For a child, creativity is expressed in play and play is the way he learns. Life is just one big erector set that is to be snapped together and pulled apart in a thousand different ways. But this flexibility often fades with the passage of time. 

We put away our toys and acquire jobs, kids, and mortgages. We become ‘specialists’ and keeping up with our specialty is supposed to take up all our spare time. But our eyes still seek out beauty and our hands itch to make something wonderful out of the wonders we see. 

We live in a culture that doesn’t encourage us to be creative unless it looks like we are going to strike it big with a commercial hit. Creativity, like so much else in our world, has been co-opted into consumerism; and its worth, calculated by how much money it generates. 

It is only recently that the word ‘amateur’ became a dirty one. Until the 1980’s, just about every educated person—no matter what his or her profession—played an instrument, or painted, or wrote for pleasure. The aim of these hobbies wasn’t necessarily to become the next Beethoven, but to deepen the sensibilities of the individual doing them. 

I would venture to say that enhanced seeing and feeling are the real reasons to create, whether it is be a garden, a haiku, or a brand new thought. 

The word ‘amateur’—from the Latin ‘amator’ or lover—means to create for the sheer love of it. I propose that we bring back amateurism with a vengeance. Weekend painters, closet writers, doctors who are poets, dancers who are CPAs! Some of our greatest scientists, thinkers, and artists have been amateurs. 

The creative spirit within us is a trickster that adores turning the world upside down. It is a tempest in our comfortable little teapot. It is our personal daemon determined to imprint our unique voice upon the planet, if only we will let it. It trips us and tickles us until we join in its playfulness. 

If we don’t express our imagination, it festers, it frustrates, it turns us into passive onlookers, when we were meant to be tooting our horn in the universal choir. 

Creativity is seriously infectious. Nothing can stop its rampant spread except embarrassment, self-doubt, and a premature insistence on perfection. Wanting our inspirations to be fully formed from the start is like expecting a new-born baby to get up and walk. 

There is a myth about the creative soul that if you don’t feel inspired, you don’t have it. I’ve been a writer for 30 years and if I had to depend on my inspiration every time I stared at a blank piece of paper, that piece of paper would stay forever blank. 

Who can know from book to book, or play to play, if they will be a success? That’s not the point of creation anyways; the point is to take the journey.

(Source: designtaxi.com)