Creativity 1

When I was about eight years old, I wrote a terrible poem about a black cat, but it had rhythm and rhyme and I remember most of it still; when I was 10 or 11, I started a funky creature alphabet book(a la Seuss) that may still exist within my mother’s papers and photos; I remember taking on the creative writing option for book reports.  I fancied the idea that like my sister, Lori, I would eventually learn to draw and paint not only from “real life” but also from the depths and creases in my brain.  When I was in my late twenties, I wrote a children’s book about famous artists when they were young, and while the illustrations existed fully formed in my head, I had not the skill to bring them to life.  Perhaps because they were so perfectly formed in my mind, I had no way to recreate them on paper.  I can see the lines, the colors, the “characters” and their movements, but I can never replicate that vision.  I don’t have the drawing gene.  For years, I was dismayed that I could not draw and paint like mother (who was also an amazing seamstress and fabric artist extraordinaire), my sister, and even my engineer brother.  

However, I do have a propensity for creativity, just not that sort of creativity.  Everyone has their own form.

When I read stories, novels and poems, I hear rhythms and melodies, sometimes whole musical scores.  When I was 11, I learned to play the organ, and music was my first acquired creative skill.  I fiddled with writing little melodies.  I have heard poems as music.  I hear the next line in a new song before I ever hear it, and I think I may have missed my musical calling because I did not know you can be JUST a song-writer without having the voice to sing the songs, which I did not.  I even have had ideas for operas, but no training, no skills, no idea where a person would start and it is a little late to start.  

When I was a college sophomore, out of a pure love for Mozart’s Requiem Mass, I made a rare bold move.  I don’t remember how I heard, but I heard that the UCR concert choir would be performing that beautiful work at their winter concert.  The quarter was already at least four weeks in, the choir had been meeting and rehearsing all that time.  My timid, self-conscious self was moved by music enough to find the choir director’s office and the director himself and announced, “I don’t have a great singing voice, but it’s not ugly.  I can blend, and I can sight read, and I love the Requiem Mass.”

     He paused.  I don’t know what he thought.  I have no recollection of his office or even his exact words, but he told me to come back the next day and sight read part of the music.  I did.  And I made that choir.  When I arrived for my first rehearsal, I was delighted to discover Professor Ruth apRoberts, who had encouraged me to publish an essay the prior year, stood behind me, belting out her tenor lines. 

I don’t think I ever learned the names of anyone in the group.  The only thing I recall vividly was the magnificent sound of our voices raised against the richness of a full orchestra. 

So, why do I now recount those memories of my creativity? 

I guess to remind myself, and all of us, how creative endeavors move us, shape us and call to us.  For all our lives.  

If and when that creativity calls, human beings feel the need to answer, and even if the result is not publishable, sell-able or recordable, we feel the weight of its incompletion.  

If creativity has marked your life, or even if you desire its mark, but feel like your life will be incomplete if you do not finish that novel, or that book of poetry, or that painting that has been in your head for years — now is the time to prioritize that creativity.  Make room for it in your daily plan.  Put it on your to-do list.  Work at it — make it your work.  

“Write a novel” has been on my “Big To-Do List” (which is what I used to call what many people call a bucket list or life goal list) since I was in my twenties.  Have I written a novel?  Nope.  Have I come close?  Nope.  I do have over 140 pages of a memoir which has been on my “priority” list for about five years.  Have I prioritized?  Nope.  If I had, it would have been done by now.  That is a hard reality to face, because it makes me feel like a failure.  

But now, as I embrace this time of my life, I have tried to let go of the mourning over what I missed out on creating all those years.  I am letting go of the reality of time wasted on inconsequential things which did not nourish me.  I am letting go of the lost ideas that had called to me, but which I could not, for whatever reason, rise up and greet. 

Embracing 53 means prioritizing the things that really matter, taking chances, not worrying about the skeptics or the inner skeptics and seeking creative adventures.  Writing is now on my daily list — some kind of writing is required before I go to bed.  Some days, I am very specific about it; other days, I just have to journal.  I am planning to take an art course of some kind this summer, to push myself into creation mode.  

Find time for your creative self — prioritize time to sit with creative energy and think, write, and do.