Let's Get Creative!

I absolutely love this. I think my Mum in particular should watch it now she's stumbled across my blog -hello Mum!- because it reminds me of the way some of my own creative endeavours seemed to pan out as an older child/teenager (to her endless mortification).

Anyway. We all know that blogging is a pretty handy, albeit slightly self-indulgent way to keep our creative muscles flexed while our day jobs slowly eat away at our will to live.

...Just me? Oh. OK.

I often think my ability to come up with new material -sometimes I wish I could stop, because I am almost definitely annoying everybody- is directly proportional to the tedium of my daily existence. I spend a lot of my day (when I'm not teaching, and sometimes when I am) making small talk with middle aged ladies, cleaning gym equipment and telling everybody to have a nice day. It's very Nice. And also extremely Dull. But the bonus is that my brain gets fidgety, and I have all this pent up creative energy that needs to be expelled elsewhere. So I get to dot about all over the place doing other interesting things, like bands, and blogs, and a bit of script work. I'm sure if I was in a brainy job where I actually earned enough to pay my mortgage every month, I wouldn't be able to muster the energy to do half of what I do. So, although I get fed up about my work situation sometimes, there are significant up sides.

This leads me to wonder about the place creativity holds in adult life. It always strikes me as a real pity that we don't get more chance to be creative when we're grown-ups. To play. All those school days we spent scribbling out stories and poems, paintings and drawings, and what do we do now? Unless we're lucky enough to work in a creative industry, not a great deal. We just don't have time, and if we do, we don't have the energy. Whenever an adult friend turns out to be good at drawing, or rhyming, or making up silly games, I always think: what a shame to have that skill and not be able to use it every day. We ought to.

So I challenge you. Do it. Do something creative this week. It doesn't have to be amazing. Just something you enjoyed and had time to do when you were little, that you never have the time to do now. You might just find yourself a new hobby, and who knows where that may lead?