I’ve always admired focused people. They have one mountain to climb and they set about climbing it. Or, if they have a whole range, they organize the peaks into groups and then knock them off one by one.
I could have used a sherpa or two in my life, I tell you.
Last night I set myself up on Twitter, and the first thing I had to do was write a “snappy” 160-character bio. These opportunities come along more and more often as I slowly expand my cyber-circle, and they’re always my downfall. How do you wrap yourself up in 25 words or less? A fictional character, sure. But yourself? Good grief!
Some people are very good at this. They make the hard decisions, they decide what they’re doing and how to brand themselves, and they do it. This ability dumbfounds me.
In fact, Twitter, and all those very focused people on it, have got me wondering why I’m on the Internet at all. Clearly, it’s worth thinking about and a few things occurred to me.
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I’ve had a wonderful life. Color and fun, travel and relocation, love and blessings in abundance. That said, I’ve created an inordinate amount of chaos in my wake. Every once in a while, a disaster befalls me from “somewhere out there,” but for the most part the disasters in my life have been created by me. Unfortunate decisions, lack of focus, plain and simple orneriness.
Still, two undeniable threads have wound themselves through the chaos: spirituality and creativity. As I’m not a spiritual teacher, I leave that one alone in my blogs. But there are a few things I can say about the other one.
Many years ago, when I was trying to stuff my round career into the square hole of a major reinsurance company in Zurich, a very sweet young secretary said to me in passing, “You’re so lucky to have creativity in your life.”
I thought about this for a long time. I looked around at the drab walls and the mindless work, and I started to think she might be right.
Then it hit me. Luck, my bazoo! I worked hard — and still do — to keep creativity in my life. Like flowers sprouting through cracks in the concrete, our God-given creativity will not be kept down. But I water mine, dump fertilizer on it, build barbed-wire fences around it, when need be.
And this is the point.
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I’ve come to believe we are all creative, however that creativity manifests itself. Personally, I’ve chosen mediums in the arts and crafts, but they could just as easily have been business or cooking or landscaping.
I also believe that there’s a lot of buried passion out there. Jobs and professions, family responsibilities, perceived economic woes…all these things give us reasons (or excuses) for shoving our creative desires out of sight on the bottom shelf. Creative pursuits drop from our lives like arts programs from school curricula.
We believe we can’t take care of life’s demands and enjoy our creative sides at the same time. Or we think it’s too late to start.
Neither of these is true. And this is what brings me back to sharing my chaotic self over and over again.
Creativity is part of us. It IS us. It’s all around us, flowing through us. Every action is a creative act, and we can direct our creativity in any way we choose. I’m tweeting and blogging and writing my little heart out because I want to celebrate this divine creative flow — especially now, when it’s being used to whip up so much darkness and misery instead of color and joy.
We are all creative, and any one of us can jump into the river at any time. We can poke in a toe or hold our nose and dive bomb. We can swim an inch or we can swim a mile. There are always ways to start and ways to keep it going. It can carry us through the hard times, and it can turn them around.
I like being part of that.
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So I guess I found my point. Again.
When everything else is going to heck in a handbag, we can choose the joyful, colorful, creative act. When all is black around us, we can follow our creative spark to the source of all creation.
And with that, we can remember to give thanks. Gratitude for what we have only brings us more.
May God bless you all.
