There have been drastic changes in our society, whether it relates to economic changes, a global pandemic, social movements, or even seasons in our own lives. I most certainly went into a sincere time of reflection, trying to make meaning of just *so* many things at once. Especially as a sociologist, I felt like I needed to document everything, while making sense of everything, while also somehow trying to translate that into personal understanding and a sense of purpose.
That ended up in my trying to do everything all at once, which led to me getting a whole bunch of nothing actually done.
I felt extremely reflective, yet at the same time, I was trying to take action and help out in any way that I could. I started new research projects, took on an abundance of mentees and teaching. I tried to write a book for the first time, which also means that I have a new wasteland of abandoned texts and snippets of intros.
Side note: For other creators: don’t actually throw those away. If they have served their time, let them go. Otherwise, you’ll usually end up coming back to them in a new, fresh way that serves the new vision. All of those drafts actually serve as our experiments and seem to be dead-ends, yet suddenly, something happens and we’ve got it! A slight twist and combination of everything that we put out there. You didn’t waste your time – you just hadn’t figured out the perfect combination yet. Those scraps are a reminder of your creative process in action and may serve you again later.
I thought I wanted to study creativity, then I got really into storytelling….then magic, transformation, back to authenticity, a good bit on success….Yet, what I really wanted was for something to be done–to somehow accelerate everything to be able to help now, or to make up for “lost time” as I was exploring the bigger picture and next steps. To simply figure something out for myself was not enough; it “had” to translate into a product, something concrete, something to share.
However, I did start to learn that creativity does not thrive if we don’t feel safe or if we have a sense of desperation. That desperation pulls us in too many different directions, while also wanting to get things done yesterday.
We fight against the clock because we have to keep up our productivity.
We dismiss ideas because they aren’t good enough/big enough/catchy enough/whatever enough.
We need the money NOW.
We have too many other things on our plate, so we try to put out all of those fires instead of doing what is really calling us at the time. However, that just bogs us down because we are forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to do.
We don’t feel like we are deserving, so we both hold ourselves back, while at the same time we are striving to do enough feel good enough. We create our own push/pull creative block.
Coming back to ourselves – creating the spaces we need to sort through all the things we “have” to do, having a space where our minds can slow down, having people around you that support whatever “crazy” ideas that we are sorting through – that is the beginning of a renaissance of authenticity (it also reminds of the poignant phrasing by the comedian Josh Johnson that we have always been “hopelessly human“).
Sometimes the first steps involve just that – baby steps. We can easily get caught up in trying to figure it all out, yet sometimes the ironic component is to just do. It truly can be the advice about doing something badly–I really did not comprehend that before, but at least for me, I couldn’t make sense of things unless I just got my hands dirty. Jump in and figure it out as I went; perhaps do something that didn’t seemingly align with a bigger purpose I hadn’t figured out yet.
Just like with each blog post – its a part of the process to create a little at a time and then help it to grow from there, hopefully together, and rather step-by-step.
Making-Meanings 