When you’re not feeling the creative spark…

There are those days when the fire inside only simmers.

What brought you to life yesterday doesn’t strike you like it did today.

Why?

It could be for many reasons.

You slept in, and now your whole day has slowed to your pace.

You’re hungover.

You ate junk food.

Jacqueline didn’t reply to your texts.

But these no longer matter. They are behind you now.

All you have is right now.

Eckart Tolle is watching you with beady eyes from across the street.

The present.

If you’re not sick, you have it in you to add oxygen to that fire, even if it burns low today.

You sit for a moment and look for the electricity running through you, but it’s like the current is anaemic.

Your nerves didn’t die. Eventually, you find something.

Feel it?

You sense yourself warming up, just sitting and breathing.

This could be the most important thing you do today. Doing seemingly nothing.

Enjoy the doing of nothing for a moment.

It’s not nothing. What a trick! You have cheated yourself into thinking you needn’t do anything. But you are doing something. You are recharging consciously.

Now find an idea you can work with.

What is bothering you?

What hurts?

What needs to change?

What is funny?

What is good in the world, right now?

What is something you can see from where you are that is interesting?

These are idea seeds. Inklings. Nuggets.

Write them down. Combine ideas into hybrids.

They can feed into your next step.

Which is to do something. Anything.

Make it ugly.

What can you create out of your idea seeds, right now?

Picture that seed. That idea. That low-hanging fruit that is at the front of your awareness, and make something hilarious, or ugly, or hilariously ugly with that idea.

Maybe you don’t even need a seed. Maybe you just start.

A drawing. A sketch. A few paragraphs of writing. A few lines spoken for an audio recording.

It needn’t be fun at all. You are merely taking a little idea, and transmorphing it into something you can touch, or hear, or see.

Create something. Expand it. Make it bigger. Be expressive. And stupid. And playful.

A pile of dirt. Just get into the mode of movement.

Now you have a right mess on your hands. Good.

Refinement can begin.

Is there anything here you can use? Can you develop something into something better?

Maybe it just needs simplifying. Making it sparse again.

If you can’t find anything useful, add more junk to the pile.

Then refine some more.

Enjoy the puzzle, regardless of how lethargic you feel today.

Notice that every step here is simple. Black and white.

You never needed to be consciously creative. You just needed to move.

You’re building something.

And it might even be brilliant.

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What makes you come alive?