Do Not Neglect Your Creativity

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism in the wrong situation” -Marie-Louise von Franz

I think everyone has had the thought "I wasn’t made for this”. Whether it’s while you’re driving your morning commute, in between emails, while shoveling dirt, I don’t really care. Life tends to serve this idea up and if you’re not careful you may take the wrong route.

In a Hollywood-driven, all-in, all-the-time world it’s easy to think “I need to quit my job and spend all day long writing my fiction book”. Or the opposite, “The cost of pursuing the thing I love is too high, I need to move on”. It’s nonsense. The reality is you probably don’t want to pursue your passion full time. Once a passion becomes a job it can cease to be a passion.

But a world without passions, now that’s even worse. As Marie-Louise points out, that repressed creativity ferments into something ugly. So do the counterculture thing: be creative for creativity’s sake.

Play the guitar, write a song, or paint a picture simply because you enjoy it.

The last three books I read…
The Bomber Mafia
Impact Players
Essentialism