Now that I’ve got ten posts under my belt and have successfully made blogging into a weekly practice, I want to say a little bit about what I think I’m going to be doing with this for the rest of the year.
The Feelings Collector is not just about acquiring more knowledge about your chosen feeling, it is about inviting the feeling into your life. Knowledge and learning is but one portal to a chosen feeling. It certainly has helped me to learn some things about creativity and the creative process that I either didn’t know before, or knew but couldn’t articulate. But my goal for playing the game this year is to feel creative, and to feel it more. Much of the rest of my writing this year will be about about my successes and failures and what I have learned. So far, my central insight has been understanding the creative process—through the Rock Tumbler metaphor—as a flow activity. Much of the rest builds onward and upward from there.
I’ve already introduced a number of my core guides to feeling more creative (Csikszentmihalyi, Cameron, Newport, and Young in particular), but in weeks to come, I will be writing about a different and more eclectic set of writers, thinkers and creatives whose ideas on feeling and manifesting creativity have influenced me. Some of these individuals write about creativity more directly, such as David Lynch.
Others among them—especially Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle—are less concerned with creativity as much as they are with “awakening,” or (God forbid!) “enlightenment.” Creativity has a mystical side to it, and I’ve found that it is well worth taking this stuff seriously even if it sounds a bit far out. In fact, far from being woo-woo, a lot of what is often derisively called “new age” is extraordinarily valuable for helping an individual feel creative more often and feeling more creative in general. There is a lot to be said for taking care of your mind, and it turns out that across time and space, many wise men and women have independently come to similar conclusions about how to do this.
The direct benefits are plain to see: a healthy mind is one that can concentrate at will and ignore distractions in the pursuit of an enjoyable activity. If your mind is unwell, achieving flow will be extraordinarily difficult and it will be that much more of a challenge to feel creative. More broadly, through a variety of mental and spiritual disciplines meant to maintain and expand your mental faculties, you can enhance the quality of your life. As Csikszentmihalyi might say: more flow, more enjoyment. Without getting too far ahead of myself or sounding like a crank, if there is something such as the “meaning of life,” creativity is an important and constitutive part of it. This will raise some hackles I’m sure, and it is something that perhaps even I have my own still-surfacing reservations about. It is, however, well worth exploring, if for no other reason than a lot of people far smarter than you or I believe this to be true in one way or another.
So, for the next few weeks I will be writing up my notes concerning three broad areas of bringing the feeling of creativity into one’s life: 1) general concerns and daily practices, 2) the role of rest, relaxation and boredom, and 3) the relationship between creativity and self-making. Eventually I’ll work my way toward the relationship between creativity and politics, but that may yet be months away. Til then!