My good friend author Kirk Kjeldsen and I have been sending each other our personally modified postcards for over 13 years. I’ve just received this one from Kirk and it’s going in the top 10 of the hundreds I’ve received from him over the years. With a few strokes of a pen Kirk sums up the truth about creativity brilliantly!
When inspiration comes it lifts the spirit, compels action, things flow, time passes unnoticed and we surprise ourselves with our ability. Then all of a sudden, some how, some way, the reasoning mind creeps in and whispers, “That’s great but…” Once the reasoning mind begins to make suggestions about how things must be, it’s all over. The wonderful feeling of buoyancy vanishes, inspiration is gone and what was once delightful begins to feel like work.
For Kirk and I this is usually when we stop what we are doing and check our artistic barometer. If we’re hungry; we eat, if tired; take a nap, if haven’t been out of the house yet; take a walk. Taking care of those needs usually does the trick but if not we’ll do something totally unrelated, something creative and silly that the reasoning mind seems totally uninterested in meddling with. For us it’s creating a silly postcard for each other. We suspect this works best because we don’t take these postcards too seriously and that is the point at which inspiration returns.
"Life is far too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde
When inspiration comes it lifts the spirit, compels action, things flow, time passes unnoticed and we surprise ourselves with our ability. Then all of a sudden, some how, some way, the reasoning mind creeps in and whispers, “That’s great but…” Once the reasoning mind begins to make suggestions about how things must be, it’s all over. The wonderful feeling of buoyancy vanishes, inspiration is gone and what was once delightful begins to feel like work.
For Kirk and I this is usually when we stop what we are doing and check our artistic barometer. If we’re hungry; we eat, if tired; take a nap, if haven’t been out of the house yet; take a walk. Taking care of those needs usually does the trick but if not we’ll do something totally unrelated, something creative and silly that the reasoning mind seems totally uninterested in meddling with. For us it’s creating a silly postcard for each other. We suspect this works best because we don’t take these postcards too seriously and that is the point at which inspiration returns.
"Life is far too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde
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