Following along the lines of the last installment of The Wonder Full Creative, I want to dive into how creativity helps us make meaning in our lives and how creativity helps us pay attention to the things around us and to the things that we love. If we’re always in a passive state of consumption, we can become pretty mindless, especially if we’re binging our umpteenth series on Netflix of the month or spending countless hours scrolling through social media or YouTube. Yes, some of those things can get us thinking and can be a source of inspiration, but more often than not, they become a distraction and a cop out. It’s easy to say that we’re gaining inspiration for the story that we’re writing by watching so much on streaming or that we’re seeing what our favorite creators are posting on social media, but if it’s a passive consumption where we’re sucked in and mindlessly watching, flipping, and scrolling, then we’re not getting anything out of it. It just eats up our time and we don’t get anything done.
But when we are regularly using our creativity and making things, we become much more mindful, and when we watch movies for inspiration or read on a topic that interests us or look at images to see how other artists have tackled a problem, we do it actively with the idea that we want to learn and be inspired. We do real research that will help us along the way. We pay attention, and glean what we can that will help us in our creative endeavors.
That is precisely why I started this venture, The Wonder Full Creative, since to be full of wonder is to be full of curiosity. It’s to actively engage with our world in mindful and productive ways. When we create we have to be very present. We can’t worry about the past, and we can’t fret about the future. We can’t dwell on things that went wrong before, and we can’t worry if people will like what we make before we even make the work. When we focus on those things, we take ourselves out of the present, and we stop paying attention to what’s right in front of us. We chase our thoughts and lose the thread of our work.