October: Get creative.

October

Get creative.

- Stay positive at all costs.

- Snap a photo every day.

- Listen to music that inspires.

- Spend at least four hours a week writing in some capacity.

- Play a musical instrument every day.

- Branch out of the norm; go somewhere new to write or play.

- Spend time on stumbleupon and the interwebz looking for inspiration.

Some say creativity is a skill that can be learned. I think that’s crazy talk. I would posit that creativity is not a learnable skill, but rather a thing inside each of us individually that can be stoked and brought to the surface. Every individual human being is born with a bulb of creativity in some form; they recognize it early in life, later in life, or never. But it’s there, regardless of their acting on it.

My whole life, I’ve leaned towards professions that rely on creativity as a necessity. However, I joined the military because I was aware that those kinds of career pursuits didn’t lead me to a comfortable financial life. And in all honesty, I didn’t believe in my own abilities.
Luckily, I ended up with a job in the military that allows my creative juices to flow if I let them, though I hadn’t thought of it that way until just recently. That’s okay though, because I realized it at all. I’ve realized that I don’t have to work with cameras or writing to be creative. I have the opportunity to be creative in how we get the job done, and I can work on creative solutions to problems that literally pop up daily.

While I enjoy the new prospect of getting creative at work, this month I’d like to focus on being creative in more facets of my life. I’ll work on playing my instruments daily, writing more of my ‘book,’ getting back into photography, etc.

When I was in high school, I did a 365 project where I took a picture every day from my 17^th to 18^th birthday. Some days it felt like a burden, but more often than not, it felt good to snap a shot of something that summed up my entire day. I remember taking a picture outside a girl’s house representing something significant that had just happened. It was the day of our first kiss and subsequently the day we considered our anniversary. That’s just one example that popped into my head, but that whole stack of photos holds memories for me that I couldn’t conjure on my own. My sister took that project a step further later on and created a scrapbook of short stories that she wrote based on a selection of photos I took that year. She gave that to me as a birthday present. Now that’s creativity hard at work. Taking a picture every day for this month will hopefully not turn into a burden, but will get me back into that creative flow with photography.

Writing is another story…. heh, get it? Uh, anyway. Yes, I’m not the best at writing. My sister’s world is writing; that’s definitely her forte. But it’s harder for me to get into that flow and come up with ideas to write about. I started a book a while back, so this month I will attempt to continue working on that project.

Music is a powerful outlet and I intend on getting back into that heavily this month as well. Generally, I write the best when I’m not happy. But I’ll go against the grain here and work on writing while I’m happy. Who knows what I’ll get by the end of this month. Could all be garbage, but that’s really not the point of creativity, now is it?

Again, the goal of this whole ‘happiness/self-improvement project’ is to build up my happiness capital so that when I really need it, I’ve got plenty to pull from. Cultivating my creativity adds to that bank so that I have outlets with which to release my stress, anxiety, unhappiness, etc.

Check out these articles if you’re looking for ways to unleash the creativity within you, or at least to get a few ideas on starting that process: the science of creativity, creativity in the workplace, and this indie/electronica mix on youtube.


Here’s to a month of singing loudly while playing my guitar badly, writing run-on sentences with poor grammar, and snapping obnoxious photos of random things.
-Jamie