creativity – Into And Out Of The Blue

Food For Thought…

Do you ever feel like you want to bolt for the door, climb into your vehicle, and boldly go where you’ve never gone before, without any plan of where to go, or when to return? How many of us – if we’re honest – do not feel that way, or have not felt that way, at least from time to time?

Although I’m not given to the “dreamer” mentality, this urge sometimes comes up and always has as a persistent voice that has accompanied me at all times and places. However, valuing maturity and responsibility keep most of us in place as adults. So we don’t bolt for the door, and really we shouldn’t. It’s part of growing up and adapting to a mature outlook.

I’ve heard it suggested that this door can be, as Rod Serling always said upon opening each Twilight Zone episode, unlocked with the key of imagination. That need not be dark or macabre. One can enter the adventure in other ways than physically deserting responsibilities and people, through creative pursuits such as the writing of a short story, or painting, or making music. You need not be “good” at it, as the world would judge it (or has been programmed to judge creativity by the powers that wannabe, for their own benefits and bottom line).

I once read (It may have been Reader’s Digest???) a true account of a woman who’d come upon hard times, and was left alone. Whatever prompted her, she began to write a fictional story. The outcome was that eventually the story she wrote actually unfolded in her life with a good and happy outcome! She had no intentions of it working out that way, but it did. It’s almost as if the creative act of writing was a prayer that was answered!

That makes you stop and wonder if the purpose of creativity isn’t far more beneficial than for entertainment or decoration, that it is a blessing that can bless, not just the one who hears and sees some “creative project or product”, but the one who also brings it forward, with the creative soul connecting to the Creator in Whose image and likeness we are made.

I think it might be good if we began to view our particular favorite art form – whatever that may be – as something far better than some means toward an ego trip to become well known or to make money, that the creativity itself may be a far more amazing phenomenon than what is actually created.

Imagine that.