Think in full colour.

Spring greens and endless hues of blues. Squinting against the intense sunlight, you feel the moist salt on your skin, the breeze playing with your hair, the trickles of sweat running down your body from every fold of skin because that sun is hot.

Your nose picks up the sweetness of flowers attracting their love bugs; your ears are soothed by sounds of lapping waves. A hammock strung in the shade of the palm trees is inviting you for a siesta in paradise.

You’re living the dream: a stress-free life on a tiny tropical island.

Actually, I am living your dream. The picture I just painted in your mind’s eye really exists. It’s not a dream though.

I live in that dream picture—it’s just not the whole picture.

There’s much more to living on a tiny tropical island, and it isn’t all fun.

Kickstarting our creativity

Let’s start with a little game. You can do this wherever you are. Grab your handbag or empty your pockets, or open the nearest drawer and randomly choose 3 objects. Doesn’t matter what.

Now figure out as many ways as possible to place these objects together on the nearest surface (yes this could be the floor of the subway, or your own hand). How many ways did you find? One, three,10, 27? We’ve just been kickstarting our creativity!

People so often say: “I am not creative”. Have they forgotten how they built castles out of two cardboard boxes when they were kids, how a stick could become a sword, mud a beautiful pie with little pebbles making the tufts of cream?

Somehow, the adult world has created (pun intended) this false belief that creativity can only be called that if it produces masterpieces and if it sells well. Otherwise, it’s considered dabbling, amateurism and mostly mediocre.

Nobody wants to be seen as mediocre. So we stop being creative. We put our creativity on a shelf, or worse, hidden in a dark corner of a basement or attic. Out of sight, out of mind.

The sad part is, that creativity needs to be used, to be activated, to allow it to come to its full expression. It’s like a muscle that needs to practice to become strong. If we don’t use our creativity muscle it will atrophy and become useless.

That’s why it is so easy to say that we are not creative. Once we have stored our creativity in a dark corner of our being, it does not get activated at all. It atrophies into a mere shadow of itself. We forget about its existence.

The good news is, that we can never totally deplete creativity.

Once we’ll take it off the shelf, reactivate it and start to practice that creative muscle, it will slowly grow in strength again, and our creativity will start to flow with more ease every time we use it.

Instead of trying to produce masterpieces, all we need to do is let our creativity practice its muscle, on play. Play with colours and shapes, with words, objects, ingredients, sounds, thoughts, options, solutions.

We cannot force the creation of something new by the intellect. But when we give our creative mind something to play with, eventually it will shape it into a new creation.

“The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”                ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch.

Happiness is an inside job

 

 

We all like to have a view from our window, our balcony, our porch. 

Spaciousness is good for the soul, I believe.

To grow mentally and emotionally, we need to open our mind. “Broaden your view, extend your horizon”, they say, when someone seems stuck in life.

This is much easier when you have a good view than when you’re staring into a dead-end alley or up to a blind wall.

It might be one of the reasons why people love watching sunsets or sunrises, since it always involves wider horizons, offering a broader perspective.

So when I was confronted with a newly constructed blank wall without a single window right in for of my little house, I felt my mind narrowing, my heart closing.

I had a hard time not feeling a little depressed and invaded.

There is something about walls without windows, that makes them extra imposing, almost unfriendly. Nothing inviting about a blank wall, right?

It was just a big empty wall. Lifeless.

Then a friend suggested painting a big mural on it, with lots of colour. Something fun to look at. Now there was a great plan. Even better: she’s an artist, and said she would love to paint that mural for me (I am not a painter, so I would need her to do the job for me, I thought then).