The final chapter of this writing project needed something conclusive to say.
As this post goes live, this collection has over two hundred entries about creativity and the creative journey. Some are pretty vapid, some others are so introspectively deep I honestly don’t know how I found the words.
I think I can take a guess, though: flow and presence. Perseverance. And the rhythm of a project that goes on and on and on for, in this case, the better part of a year of near-daily writing.
It’s been a long road so far and, as I pen the last formal explanation of my long list of chapters in this collection, it strikes me that I’ve probably found more from the effort of making it, writing, promoting it, and refining it over the last ten months as I suspect any other person will ever extract from it for themselves.
That is the final lesson, I guess: that when everything else falls away and you just find the moments when creativity and inspiration and motivation collide… well, interesting things do happen. The effort of just trying is worth it. There is a fluidity of thought that emerges from a mind that gets into a pattern of creativity, sets out on an adventure to make something big and impossible, and does the work.
There are nearly thirty chapters in this collection and they bounce across the spectrum of creative philosophizing, dabbling in the nuance of self to the perception of others past the complexity of commercial value and span the years of our lives as creators of things. I’ve dabbled in trying to explain each of them, and now we come to the last of it: what happens when we just find peace in what we are doing and let that be enough?
This may be the last in a long list of explanatory posts but under the category of Potency & Peace I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.
Terms FROm this POSt
- creative journey
- I often go on an on about creativity like an adventure. Creativity is more than a product, tho. It’s bigger than the destination. It’s a way of looking at the world and interpreting it through human eyes, and with each iteration getting better at doing that. That’s a journey.
- inspiration
- A vague concept I mention frequently in my writing but rarely pause to define, I think the notion of being inspired is really at the foundational level, the seeds of creativity. Without inspiration, without muse, without spark creativity is just work or repetition or rote effort. Inspiration does not necessarily need to be monumental or epic or of the highest quality, but rather it is what is at the start of every creative process …until it flowers and drops more seeds of inspiration and the cycle repeats.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
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