a.mustard seed

Our personal sense of creativity plunders time and time again- in a cyclical and almost familiar way. When this happens we excuse it with thoughts like "I just don't feel inspired" or "I just don't have the time!" or self pitying claims like "I'm not an artist." I'll address each separately.

"I don't feel inspired": With this claim we acknowledge that inspiration is a feeling; a transient, temporary, and ultimately finite emotion that is a complete product of one's circumstance. We state that to be inspired one has to feel inspired, meaning that that feeling, just like any other feeling such as anger, resentment, happiness, etc. can ultimately disappear and change whenever our situation dictates it to. Feelings don't spontaneously appear- they are triggered by something else. Motivated by someone. Some sort of motion is required in order for inspiration to occur. It cannot happen on it's own. Inspiration is thus something ungrounded in the overall reality of one's life and is instead an occasional result.

"I just don't have the time!": The claim acknowledges that life is short and that time is important and required in order to perform any activity. By saying this one is considering the fact that time is something to be possessed, owned; you have it or you don't. But how is time a possession? The concept of "free" time as an independent reality really emerged during the Industrial Revolution and usually meant "time not working" or "time not making wages."
To avoid tangents, I believe that whoever makes this claim is a hypocrite. They claim to have no time when in reality they do have the time, they just spend it doing something else (note: time has economic value and is something to be spent). One make's time for things one wants to do. The problem is not that one doesn't have time but that one doesn't want to do it.

"I'm not an artist": Now, this is just ridiculous. We all know that everyone is capable of creativity. Every one is and can be an artist. The contrary is just nonsense. Some people say that an artist is someone who creates beauty, meaning that those who fail to accomplish this are not artists. But the standards of beauty should be understood as social constructs; as relative, faulty, and broken. There is no universal, objective understanding of what beauty is and what an artist is. Just ask an artist belonging to the DaDa movement. I'm not going in to detail as what it means to be an artist but what I will say is this: to use this argument as an excuse for not creating is absurd. Enough said.

Anyone can create beauty because everyone is meant to create. We have brains, hands, bodies, eyes, ears, and other body parts that are capable of making, of creating something.


My point is this. When we do not create it is not because we don't feel, have time, or lack the ability. It is because we are out of touch with the ultimate creator and with what it means to create. We forget that we are created beings, that everyone and everything around us has been brought into existence by someone much greater than us.

Life around us is a story board and we are the characters narrated in it. As every good literature buff may know, the narrator of a story is not always the voice of the author. This means that you might be the narrator of your life, the one who gets to tell it, but you are certainly not the one who wrote it. Wanting to create means wanting to know what it feels like to be an author and it reflects our desperate need for contact with The Author. Only when we are in contact with a creator do we feel remotely inspired to imitate it and create.