Creativity, Wordpress, and Anxiety.

    Lately I’ve been working on a new website trying to build it via the WordPress templates.  Everyone told me that it’s easy and the best way to put something together. I haven’t found that to be true. It’s been one challenging thing after another. If I’m not reading, reading, reading about it I’m correcting, correcting, correcting. Finally I got it going pretty well, but there’s going to be more stuff that I need to put on it. When I discover what that is I’ve got enough duct tape to last awhile, and if that doesn’t work I’ll just use bubble-gum to keep it together. 

    This new website is all about my next project. It's called 'Full Balloon Conversations on Creativity'. www.fullballoon.com It’s all about learning how other people create. What inspires them, how they do the work of creating things or making things if you prefer. These things have always intrigued me, and I’ve decided to put together a podcast all about having those conversations with people. Mainly because I can't get enough of talking about it.  Well, that and coloring I thought the best way to put people at ease when we're talking is to have some kind of activity. Who doesn’t like coloring? Coloring books, crayons, colored pencils.

    I was just reading this little article on creativity and anxiety and found a couple of great quotes.

     “Creativity is the word we use for our desire to make use of our inner resources, employ our imagination, knit together our thoughts and our feelings into beautiful things like songs, quilts, or novels, and feel like the hero of our own story.”

I’m not to sure how I feel about how the sentence finishes. I think most of the time people just want to create for the sake of doing it. They don’t feel a need to be a hero of any kind, but the rest of it works pretty well. Using what's inside of us to make something, but what stops us? The next quote talks about just that. Anxiety.

     “We get anxious because we fear we may fail, because we fear we may disappoint ourselves, because the work can be extremely hard, because the marketplace may criticize us and reject us, and so on. We want to create, because that is a wonderful thing, but we also don’t want to create, so as to spare ourselves all this anxiety.”

     The anxiety of making something and either being judged by our peers or ourselves is very real I think, but because it’s so normal why can’t it be overcome? Of course it can. What if we used our anxiety as a barometer? Do you think it can tell us when we are on the right track? It has certainly told me when I’m about to do something adventurous. I felt it when I bought my house, my first gigs, when I got married, the first time (every time) I drive solo across the country, and many others. I can tell by that feeling that something intense might happen. 

Am I ready for it?

How about you?  

Are you ready for it?

Homework: Get a coloring book, and then get coloring.