It’s the silent draw of creativity, its inexplicable nature of frivolity and playfulness that pulls me in like a magnet. My mind tries to come up with an interesting account of its conception, as if it is something that might deepen my understanding of it. But objectively speaking, what comes to mind are moments I recognize as both enemies and allies of my creativity well. All too often, the list covers self-induced fears and narratives and by extension of these, our families and the aforementioned gravitation towards art, spontaneity, movement. Creativity comes up to surface after years of dwelling in the bottomless ocean and decidedly pushing its way into your made-up life for space.
Usually, making space for creativity happens when I am moving — traveling, road tripping, running, intuitively moving, doing yoga, dancing, having sex. I always look forward to what some call these moments of flow. Something magical happens when you’re in these states of moving and feeling, rather than thinking and calculating. My brother says it showering for his wife, and for others, it might be hiking. In my 20’s, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I loved so much about traveling and chalked it up to just being young and wanting to experience the colors of the city. It was a different kind of thrill in exploring when you’re 20-something, because you place more value on excitement and novelty and soaking it all in. I guess you could say, I had more of a hands-off approach, passivity of what is to come. As I stand on the cusp of my 30’s, I am in altogether different experience. Adulthood has weathered and enriched me with a knowing for its full range of experiences. These days, I ask myself how I can give, contribute, consume less and create more.
But I have always known to be in love with creativity. In the summer I turned 20, I moved in to a two-story house off campus and after an afternoon of smoking White Widow kush, I ended up painting a mural across the living room wall. My roommates and I put on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, although I can’t remember exactly if it was watching the movie or painting the mural that came first. The feeling of freedom and wild expression as I painted the span of the wall with vivid colors and bold lines is something that sprang up without much plan. I fell in love with it. By then, I had felt the freedom that college grants an adult teen and had been thriving in my own illusion of independence. My journey as a yoga student started a little after I moved out of that house and lived in Pacific Beach, where I would bike to the local Corepower studio and with the 2008 Economic Crisis that every millennial felt, life became all too real. When people ask me why I left California, I usually reach for the same honest answer that I wasn’t going anywhere being a beach bum that sometimes forgot to put on slippers leaving the apartment. It felt as if I was taking off my own rose-colored glasses and reaching for clearer ones. Talking to a friend about moving abroad, she offered: “you can leave the states for a year, two or five, and you’ll see when you come back, everything stays the same”. Boy, did that truth stick.
Convenience is the way of life in the states, but it is undeniably a warped sense of convenience. Alongside convenience, there is luxury, entitlement, complacency, convention, and for me, it felt suffocating. Some things really don’t change, and no matter how many ways you spin the truth or slice it, the way and will of America is about convenience — no matter the cost. Those who pay for the price of illusions and pretending dutifully play out their roles in backwards systems, that it takes a pretty bold act of critical reason to step out of it. For me, creativity has become political in every sense. To be creative, we have to push out every notion of conformity or convention out.
Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss death, taxes, etc). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it is a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if our gods and angels gathered together and said, ‘It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here — have some delights’ ”.
More recently, this clearing out for creativity happened in the way of decluttering — something I feel as if I have been working on for the last decade of my life. The first clear memory imprinted in my mind of decluttering was the day I was stuffing my belongings into 2 immigration bags as I imagined my new life in Korea. Decluttering takes a lot of energy because the required effort is extensive and calls for piecemeal progress. As I start the painstaking process, it becomes cathartic to suss out my spending habits and items I had acquired to start “something new”. The lengthier the time this item has sat in a corner, the sadder I feel when I hold it. Our things become artifacts that sit in the crevices of boxes and spaces that come to reflect our own energetic stagnancy. Packing evidently became an opportunity for me to have some self real-talk and honest confrontation of what I wanted to insert back into a new space — plus what habits and hobbies I’d bring along with me.
Now that I am here in the new space designed for creativity, I am delighted in what I can welcome into my days and the season of winter. It feels as if I have finally stepped into the world of creativity that my heart has silently yearned for. It feels like medicine to all the years of traveling and living out of a suitcase. It feels like a sacred altar to the wild, imaginative years ahead of me.
It is a process that never stops, as I continue to weed through things. I am, after all, a consumer in the age that we live in although my consumption has become more mindful and resourceful. What I do know is that creating has indeed become my antidote for consuming, a sort of homage to what Gilbert refers to as the “natural order of life: the eternal inhale and exhale of action and reaction”.
