This post is going to be super-real.
As though you and I are sitting in a coffee shop and I’ve got some coffee frou-frou drink with caramel and chocolate in it and you’ve got whatever you like and we’re just groovin’ on talking about creativity… life… and taking chances.
You won’t win if you don’t play and all that jazz.
This is going to be a riff on some thoughts that came to me while I was driving to church last week. Good thoughts often come to me in this way. I’ll be listening to music, driving down a boring highway, and then suddenly my mind will snap into an intriguing revelation and BOOM!
I’m off to the races.
This is when I am deeply grateful for my iPhone’s built-in recorder app. I just quickly tap that button and start talking.
Here’s what I said:
In order to create really great art, you can’t care about what anyone thinks when you’re in the throes of creating. There has to be freedom… a certain untamed wildness within you that has the opportunity to run free.
That wildness many times gets squelched or controlled because of fear.
A fear of not being right. A fear of what others will think. Lots of fear.
It keeps people from creating. It keeps people from allowing that untamed wildness within them to really fly high.
Unhindered. Unrestrained.
I feel there are so many people who are overly picky, overly analytical, trying to control every single thing in their life.
But the untamed wildness is messy.
It’s free.
And there are times when it does make a big mess.
Huge splotches of paint left on the edges of a table that wasn’t meant to be art but there it is. The afterbirth of something amazing that was just created.
In order to reach that point where you have allowed your true genius to shine, you have to release the fear. Let go of the worry. You can’t worry about whether you’re getting it perfectly out or not at that point. You just have to get it out.
You can’t worry about what people think.
I think about creative people who are so exact with their art. Who stress over getting just the perfect word or the perfect line or perfect color for whatever it is they’re creating.
And their lives are so orderly. So exact.
But I can’t help but wonder… where is the wildness? The untamed wildness that gallops through their heart like a powerful stallion who knows how to run like the wind, muscles that ache for open fields, rippling beneath furred skin?
In the quest to catch that creative wildness, was it tamed to the point of blandness? Has all the fire of that wildness been squeezed out so that nothing is left but perfect shapes and lines?
When it comes to creativity, I really think we’ve got to welcome that untamed wildness. The wild, untamed wildness that is a burning ember within all of us.
We have to cultivate it. Call it out.
Allow its flames to engulf you.
And then watch your art rise like the phoenix from its ashes, and stand in awe.
Photo credit: markchadwickart / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND