On Creativity

I finally pulled another metaphorical splinter from my finger and got a good look at the specifications of what has been a constant, although subconscious, irritation during the past eight weeks. 

Improvisation. 

Let’s improvise. Let’s rework this a little. How can we position this into a positive? In some ways, this new way of looking at our patterns can be restorative! We have to realize this is a new normal. What an opportunity to be creative!

Stop. I am aching from the tourniquet of my tightly, abruptly, transfigured plans. 

Although a deeply creative and largely free-form individual, I have always operated best with a plan in place. A thesis for being, a we’re-going-here-then-there mentality. I learned in my twenties how closely an emotional breakdown follows the upheaval of my expected outcomes. This is true in work, in love, in going to the store for green onions and finding none on the shelf. 

So, I am asking, how do I find a substitute for the green onions?

Meaning, how do I keep finding substitutes for community? For driving with the windows down? For cocktails and charcuterie with friends after work on Friday? For getting a strawberry ice cream cone and licking it until I have a numb tongue and sticky fingers? What is the next-best ingredient for deconstructing and reconstructing all of my projects at work? What is the estimated timeline for waiting on the next societal update that will necessitate another deconstruction and reconstruction? Another round of improvisation? More creativity?

Perhaps this is why I can’t write and I’ve stopped singing. All of life is one large mandatory test of creativity. Everything mundane and task-oriented is now an examination of flexibility and repositioning. I have no margin for error. All of my out-of-the-box ideas must be timely, engaged, and executable. They must be full of innovation and invention but realistic, attainable, and, lord help me, something the community can fit on the spoon heading toward their mouth. 

This is a language of creativity I do not speak. How to make a process fluid. I have always struggled with this and have been trying to work on it for about a year. On my desk at work, I have a Virginia Woolf quote pinned where I can see it to help me: “I am rooted. But I flow.” Turns out, I have not made as much progress on being a person of both foresight and fluidity. 

Splinter out, now there’s a raw spot. What balm do I use for this? Perhaps grace with myself for trying and trying again. I could try gratitude for having the option to rework anything at all. Maybe it is time. But how long?

Creativity should be an unknown. Novels should hold up a mirror until we see ourselves. Poetry should teach us something new about something we thought we knew everything about. What I like about writing poetry is that I come to it not knowing anything at all. The blank page holds every word I write and I let it take me where it wants to go. A poem always tells you when it is finished. I write until I stop. That’s it. And then I see what it has to teach me. 

But I have been unable to look at the poem of the pandemic and see what it has to teach me. I want a timeline and itemization and I want it to get on its knees and open large blue eyes and say with words and body language that it is exhausted and repentant and that everything will be better in the morning. That I can expect normalcy again. That it will give me back creativity in the wildest sense and let my mind have the bandwidth to wrestle with rhyme and meter because it will not have to wrestle a net profit out of an event no one has the money or freedom to attend. But I know that I cannot know when this uncertainty will end the way I know when a poem does. It is one long exploration. 

The pandemic will not make peace, but one of us must bend. I am taking a bundle of chives home, and they will just have to do.