05. All quite comforting

Every day since this project began (i.e., these oh-so-dramatic last five days), I have had to resist the urge to begin every post by typing into the stratosphere, "I don't want to write. I don't want to write. I don't want to write." Liz Gilbert reminds me that it is simply boring to be a creative who complains about how frustrated she feels, because frustration is essential to the creative life. She also talks about how you don't have to be a creative and be a tormented, tragic person. It's all quite comforting.

A lot of what catapulted me into this project is the result of stewing and marinating in the cocktail that is reading Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are and listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. (Prior to last month I did not know there was a genre for "Creativity" on Amazon. And now for the last few weeks I've been talking David's head off about creativity and the creative process and I'm sure he's like, Yeah, I went to school for this. #arsepoetica)

What I'm taking away from Gilbert's book (besides everything, obviously) is that creative living is a marriage between discipline - the only thing you can control among talent, luck, and discipline - and inspiration. (I'm paraphrasing here, but: "If greatness were to find me, may it find me hard at work.")

Being creative is a gift bestowed on all of us; however, actually creating is a choice. I appreciated how Gilbert acknowledges that having (or making) time to create is a complete and total luxury, but that perhaps instead of seeing creative living as hedonistic, we can instead perceive and then thus receive the ability to create as a divine gift.



P.S. Thank you, Eunice, for introducing me to Overdrive for e-books and audiobooks. It took me about a year to actually try it out but I'm loving it now! And thank you, Christine, for recommending the audiobook version for Gilbert. Totally the perfect medium; except for when I'm driving and I need to pull aside to write down something amazing she said.