Sucking Out Your Creativity

Inside me (and each of us) is a drive for creativity. It’s a drive to discover, learn, explore, experience, succeed and fail. For some of us, we have been fortunate to be able to recognize this and understand how to nurture that creativity.

I know people who are way more successful than I am at cultivating their creativity.

Just like there are master gardeners who have a gift at nurturing plants, these people have mastered the skill of nurturing their creativity. They are experts at producing art, music, literature, woodworks and many, many other beautiful contributions to this world.

I’m still working getting good at nurturing my creativity and unfortunately, I recently realized there are situations like a bad drought or a dried sponge that can literally suck the creative life out of you.

I just left a full-time job that was cruelly efficient at sucking the creative energy out of me. The job was successful at demanding and possessing nearly all of my daily focus and energy until I had no resources left to be creative.

When I finally realized what was happening, I could compare it to a dry sponge — wrinkled and dried out and unable to do what it was intended for but, with a bit of care and nourishment, able to return to it’s formal shape.

I thought a lot about work-life balance as I struggled with leaving this job and came to realize that the “life” side of the balance scale contains not only personal, family and spiritual health but it also contains creative health.

Ruin your ability to be creative and the scale tips way out of balance.

I slowly feel myself getting “creatively healthy” again and reconnecting with the world. Fortunately, I was not so far gone that I couldn’t be restored.

I hope that this experience becomes a lesson that I never forget. Being creative is way too enjoyable!

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