The great thing about being creative is that you get a lot done, and the more you do, the more exciting it is.
The not-great thing about being creative is that creativity has its own schedule.
This past week, I’ve been doing creative output 10+ hours a day, ranging from costume drafting to programming. I’ve been using the active/”on” time for one creative activity to simultaneously operate as the passive/”off” time for another. I’ve been juggling, and laughing exultantly all the while.
Today, I am utterly useless.
My brain wants nothing more than for me to sit and watch paint dry—so, naturally, I’ve been watching head-explodingly adorable kitten videos on Youtube.
Unfortunately for me, I’m not driven by ambition, by goals, or by competition. I’m driven by boredom…or rather, my utter abhorrence of it. And watching kitten videos, while an excuse to gabble and squeal incoherently for 20 minutes, is a pretty boring activity for me.
“Well, fine, I better find something more stimulating to do.”
So I hopped on facebook.
I can hear the eyerolls. I hear them.
At which point I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who, like me, has a past firmly anchored in music performance (mine, if you lovely folks didn’t catch the first post, was in oboe performance).
“GUESS WHAT”
“what”
“I BOUGHT A VIOLIN YESTERDAY”
I did, indeed, buy a violin yesterday. I’ve always wanted to play—but that takes us down a very long yarn.*
I was expecting an eyeroll followed by “of course you would” and a head shake with a grin, but I fell flat on my emotional face when he asked:
“Have you ever played a string instrument before?”
This set my brain off in about ten different ways, but the biggest protests were the following:
How in the world is that a relevant question? Who decides whether or not to do something based on personal precedent? How would anyone ever learn anything with that sort of attitude? Did he live his life this way?
“What kind of stupid-#$& question is that?” I demanded.
“Let me rephrase it. Are you going to get a teacher, or are you just winging it?”
And I got set off again. Since when was this a point of contention when learning something new? I remember him picking up piano, and I remember how obsessed he was with it, and how brilliant he became. I remember him patently refusing to get a teacher, because it was expensive, and because he wanted to learn from recordings, rather than the dictations of a local piano teacher. I remember how far he pushed himself and how much of his potential he realized just by practicing intelligently. And now this from him?
So slammed my laptop shut, because I was about to tear his head off.
And then I thought about it. I was being really emotional about this. But the creative process is near and dear to me. It is the engine of my life. It’s the antithesis of boredom.
Where did creativity come from, anyway?
I opened up my laptop again, then redirected to Youtube. If I was going to be useless, I may as well learn something!
The first video I found was a TED talk by Jak Panksepp about studying the neuroscience of emotion in animal brains. Then I link-hopped to a TED talk by Vincent Walsh about the neuroscience behind creativity.
My big takeaways were the following:
1) Depression/purposelessness and enthusiasm are emotions resulting from “competing” emotional systems. Feed one, and it’s influence over your emotions waxes while the other’s influence wanes.
2) creativity doesn’t actually happen when you’re working on a project. Creativity happens when your brain is resting. Rest allows different parts of your brain to talk to each other, and that’s how new connections form, and that’s where new ideas come from.
3) creativity is not originless. Creativity can only happen after you have obsessively worked on a specific skill set or problem for hours and hours, consistently, over long periods of time.
Conclusions:
1) Creativity feeds the enthusiasm system, which starves the depression system, and which causes a positive feedback loop; creativity is then exhausted because no time has been spent allowing the synthesis of new ideas, which leads to boredom, which leads to depression, which starves the enthusiasm.
2) Your brain needs a lot of feeding and some time for digesting before it’s gonna poop out that million dollar idea.
At first, I thought this was interesting, but then it made sense. Or rather, it made traits about me make sense. Have time for a story? Great!
A month ago, I went to Romania—Bucharest, to be precise. I was gone for a week. The month prior that, I was in a terrible mood, dominated by anger, frustration, and hopelessness. I knew I was mad, and I knew I was mostly mad at myself, because I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live. But what was that life? I had no answers. How did I define happiness, and how could I attain it? I had no answers for that, either. What was I passionate about? My question was met with silence.
I left for Romania four days before my 27th birthday. I had been dozing on the plane for three hours when it suddenly hit me.
It was less like a eureka moment and more like the dam had burst open. I tore my laptop from my backpack, slapped it open, and furiously typed out a stream-of-consciousness that would give Faulkner a hard-on. Within twenty minutes, I had discovered the answers, which were now clear as day, to all but one of the questions I had been asking myself incessantly for the last six weeks. Within the next twenty-four hours, I had answered the last question, and then deftly wove the answers together to come up with a life plan that I would be able to start executing within the year, and would be able to see to fruition within 2-3 years.
Let me rewind and point out the important bits:
Questions I had been asking myself incessantly for the last six weeks.
Dozing on the plane for three hours.
Suddenly hit me.
Sounds a lot like that eat-digest-poop cycle I outlined above, doesn’t it?
It was a surprise to me that creativity would crop up in life questions, and not just related to writing, or fashion design, or programming. But that’s all creativity really is—problem-solving. Which applies to any aspect of your life.
Which means that self-help books that talk about turning your life around on a dime are worthless, because if you constantly think about your life, really examine it, agonize over it, obsess over how to improve it–and then take a vacation…
Your brain will do the rest.
Bam.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go enjoy the heck out of a few movies and beach reads for the next day or two. For the time being, it’s my job.
Elliot's Explorations 