Creativity

It feels really good to be motivated to write again. Where does motivation come from or where does it go when it leaves? For me when it leaves, I suppose it goes into the mounds of dust on the furniture or the ever present dog hair dancing around the wooden floors or the never ending pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. It goes to the child with the 103 degree fever or when the fever goes, the boy with the newly found adolescent attitude! It goes to the husband whose love absolutely keeps me whole but whose energy can be so draining at times. Then there's all the thought and preparation needed to maintain a gluten free diet. Life for most of us is so busy, it could suck the motivation out of a windmill in the middle of a hurricaine! Oh...and how about the hormonal changes that accompany a woman in midlife (well, pssing midlife)? You know...the hormonal changes that turn you from a perfectly logical, calm, balanced woman into a crazed, illogical, screaming, crying mess and let's not forget this mess could heat Antartica in the middle of winter at any given moment!

The list could go on and on, but all of that is my life, and it's not going to change any time soon. So the question becomes how does one hold on to themselves and their creative energy through all of life's motivation killers? The way I see it is maybe, if we give ourselves the chance and just make the choice to try, we can take those very things that have the potential to suck us dry and turn them INTO our motivation. We can write about the dust on the furniture, or if you're an artist then maybe you could draw a beautiful picture in it and post it on the internet for the rest of us to marvel at!

I never thought that one of the saddest events of my life, losing my mother, would motivate my creativity but I can clearly see now that for me, writing is and always has been,  a gateway to my healing. At the moments when we think our motivation is gone, it may just take one small act, like putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to realize it's still there, just waiting for you to give it a chance to surface.

I just glanced over and noticed a beautiful red cardinal on my birdfeeder. I wonder what would happen to the bird if it lost it's motivation to fly. It would lose it's unique gift of having the broad perspective on life that can only be seen from the sky. It's perspective would be drastically reduced to only what can be seen in front of it. How sad.

Creativity takes the every day, mundane tasks and gives us the opportunity to make something more of them. It can take the hardest, darkest moments in our lives and turn them into something beautifully moving to share with others. Some of the most famous works of art were motivated by someone's pain. Some of the music that touches us so deeply was written from a place of suffering. Creativity gives us the ability to rise above life's most challenging times. Our motivation comes not in spite of them, but because of them.

Creativity gives us wings, and I'm grateful to have found mine again. 

xo,
Carrie