September 07, 2007

Perpetual creativity

Being creative has nothing to do with your mind. The mind exists to judge, to criticize -- because it's a survival organ, the mind's primary function is to make sure we're safe, to judge if that yellow blob over there is a scary lion or a broken bulldozer. The mind can't deal with uncertainty, and being creative is always, always putting yourself in the land of the uncertain. To the untrained mind that's equivalent to walking into traffic blind. The prospect of something new, something that arrives out of nowhere is intrinsically terrifying to our egos.

There is no place for the mind during the process of actually creating things. We take advantage our minds later, at the end of the process, to evaluate if what we have made is beautiful, ugly, scary, worthwhile, or might land us in jail.

Learning to become perpetually creative is nurturing the habit of getting our mind out of the way. Writer's block is just a habit. The amazing thing about human beings is that we can nurture new habits. We can retrain ourselves to create differently.