Testing a Theory

I know, I know. It's been so long you hardly recognized me. Well, I know how you feel. It's getting so I hardly recognize myself anymore.
Maybe it's just the season for reflection, resolutions, whatever you wanna call it, and maybe by luck or happenstance, the world slowed down just long enough for me to get my bearings. But I did, and I have a little nugget to show for it. And aren't you lucky I'm gonna share my nugget with you.

You ready?

Here it is: I think that the best times for creativity are when there's little else going on.
(I did say it was a little nugget.) Think about it: when we were all younger, without the deadlines and meetings and things to fill the time, we thought up stuff to do. Games to play with each other, or with ourselves. I believe that's why papier-mache was invented. Certainly rubber bands and paper clips and poster board and thumbtacks helped to both pass the time and foster creativity. And I noticed recently that I haven't had those bursting-with-creativity moments for a while now. You know the ones - where your brain is spinning and your fingers are twitching and your feet are jiggling to hurry up and get some place where you can put your ideas on paper, or make that cool thing you just thought of, or sew something, or write a song, or build a treehouse, or ...Something.
Well anyway, it's been a while. And I think the whole time that I've been ... I can't say the word. I just hate it. But it starts with a "bizz" and ends with a "zee." Anyway, the whole time I've been...that word, I've been squeezing the little creativity bug out of my brain.

And it's not that I want to drop out of life to make things with glue and bits of paper, necessarily. But I think the creativity bug and the curiosity bug are closely related. And it's one or both of them that makes me say at work, "I wonder if there's a better way to do this?" or "What new technology can help me do my job better, reach more people, be more?" It's that same creativity bug that looks around a room and realizes that rearranging the furniture a little makes it so that you can see the TV from everywhere in the room, so you can watch it and do something else, if you're of a mind to. Or that with a little bit of materials, you can start planting seeds early, and be the first person on your block with snapdragons in bloom. Or ... enough. You get the point.

So I must calm the beast that has become my life and let the ideas come. I need to become reaquainted with (is it too much to say 'the artist within-'?) myself. Or perhaps newly acquainted with who I'm becoming.

I know this sounds like more variations on a theme, and in a way it is. But I guess now the difference is that I'm not just missing 'me' time. I'm missing what I did with the 'me' time. The things I created, the excitement I felt at a new project begun. I'm seeing the what all this is costing me. And it's not worth it.

I've come to some big decisions, the biggest of which I can't mention here just yet. But they all go back to peeling away the layers of unnecessary things.

When you find/
what's worth keeping/
with a breath of kindness/
blow the rest away...

I miss you all.
all three of you who read this! :-)