The creative process does not always behave rationally. The way creative people experience this process feels paranormal in many ways. If we see ourselves as being at the center of this process -- the main agent of it -- we drive ourselves mad when the creative juices don't flow. What is a healthier way to think about this process and to save our sanity?
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, discusses the creative muse and how creative people can work in spite of the immobilizing pressure that social expectations place on them. This is the video that first drew me into TED Talks.
What happens when we shift our focus, in the creative process, from the expectation that our creative work flows from within us to something that resembles a dialogue between our mysterious creative muse and ourselves? What might this do to eliminate the creative block?
The creative person needs to rediscover a safe distance from themselves and their anxiety about the reaction to what they are creating will be. We used to have a mechanism for managing the emotional risks of creativity. Gilbert suggests that we need to re-discover something like that once again.
Perhaps we need to see our creative performance, once again, as being a glimpse of God. Perhaps we need to see our creative inspiration as something that does not come from within us, but something that is on loan to us -- that visits us for awhile and returns from whence it came.
This video is found on my YouTube playlist "Being Wrong and Other Insights"
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