Live a Creative Life, One Sudsy Glass at a Time! #TBSU

Do you use your creative capacity 

as part of your everyday life? 

Could you can recognize and get greater satisfaction 

from the things you are already doing? 

Can you turn every act into a time 

to think, act, and simply be creative?

We can make more opportunities to grow creatively, and to define creativity in a way that makes it accessible to us all the time!

What are you already doing that fulfills your need to be creative? 

It could be – I hope it’s true – that you are already living more creatively than you think.

As a first step, let’s look at the difference between an ordinary, everyday experience, and a creative experience, what we might also call an aesthetic experience. An example of an ordinary experience might be somebody poking a stick into a fire. The person might say, “Well, I wanted to get the fire to burn a little better.” 

What if the person focuses on the fascination of watching the interaction between the flickering flames and the coals that crumble at a touch? What if she notices the sensation of heat on skin, the smell of wood smoke, the crackle of a sizzling twig?! Voila! She is having a creative experience!

Attitude is Everything!

The actual experience is not the important thing. Our attitude toward the experience is what defines it as ordinary or extra-ordinary. Buddhism does a great job with this concept. One of the main ideas of Buddhism is the principle of mindfulness. Basically, the message is: Pay Attention! 

If you are washing a glass, savor the bubbles and the hot water. Rub your thumb against the edge and listen for the squeak. Use a nice-smelling dish soap, something you like, and sniff the lingering scent of the soap on your hands a few minutes later. Pay attention!

Don't Live an Antiseptic Life! 

Our modern lives can seem antiseptic. We can get preoccupied with details, and yet paradoxically not get much pleasure from them. We write a check to pay the gas bill, but we don’t notice the feel of the pen in our hands, or the silkiness of the ink as it flows onto the paper. 

Think of your great-grandmother’s rocking chair. To her, it was a convenient place to sit, an ordinary, everyday, taken for granted part of an ordinary life. But to us, now, that exact same rocking chair may be a work of art, a beautiful antique. We almost hesitate to sit in it, it’s so precious. Do you see the irony here? What if we could transfer that future reverence into the present moment, and still maintain the utility? That would be living creatively.

A Fun Challenge!

I want you to do something right now. I want you to wiggle around a little in your seat. Feel the steadiness of it against your back. Feel how well it supports you, how easily you can relax, feeling secure that it isn’t going to collapse under you. This is a little silly, but I want everybody to say, “Thank you, chair!” Everybody now, “Thank you, chair!” 

Maxi instinctively savors every sensation! We can too!

You know what, we just had a shared aesthetic experience, a little moment of creativity in the middle of sitting at a computer with you reading, me writing, a blog! Feel free to keep enjoying a creative adventure with your chair as we continue.

In fact, continue your day and evening enjoying EVERYTHING as a creative adventure! What's your favorite sensory experience? What are the everyday tasks that you savor? Send your ideas and inspirations via the comments! I look forward to reading your thoughts!

Check out these related posts:

• Publish or Perish vs the Law of Attraction
• Wait! Change! It's the Law of Attraction!

• Developing Your Voice: Novel Writers Workshop #TBSU
• Why Wait to Be Creative? #TBSU

Three creative blogs, presented here in the grand tradition of The Blog Scratchers' Union! #TBSU

• Vidya Sury 

• Kevin Hanrahan 

• Scarlett Flame (for adults, please!)