Have an affair with your creativity!

How do you find the time, really, make the time to be creative?

I think we all define or describe creativity differently—from diving into new opportunities at work, to drawing, painting, building, cooking, sewing, knitting, singing, to playing instruments, and more.

As I think about creativity in my work or in my play, it means total immersion, commitment to process,  and oftentimes to product, too.

• What about you?
• What does creativity mean to you?
• In what ways are you creative?

If you’re not in a formal program that gives you some structure and freedom to nurture your creativity, how do you do it? This is the question I have wrestled with over time and perhaps even more recently because of I am noticing that time feels WONKY in this pandemic— both so compressed AND so endless.

As I make time for getting out to walk daily, I’m currently listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic. She raises the same question, about making time for creativity, in a fun and provocative way, she says,

“Have an affair with your creativity!”

I love that! Gilbert went on at quite some length about the ways that we find time to have an affair/make time for what matters to us. So that might be a big slice of time but more likely, it’s tiny pockets of time—15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, because life is busy. I find 10-15 minutes too short and unsatisfying to me… What about you?

So that’s my question to you today and I want to hear your answers. How do you make time in your life to nurture your creativity?

Here are half a dozen ways in which I do it, I hope you’ll share yours too.

1. I carve out an hour every evening after dinner before watching a bit of Netflix.

2. When I’m working on a project, a passion project to be exact, I start my workday an hour earlier and I devote the first hour of my day to that project. I put on some music for 60 minutes, I love the app, focus@will, and I do nothing but that work for that time. It is exhilarating!

3. I buddy up with someone who has an interest in pursuing a particular aspect of creativity—we might take a course together or am just be checking in with each other. My favorite example of doing this right now is partnering with my friend Julia Curtis in Tasmania. We spend every Thursday, in the late afternoon for me, and early Friday morning for her, working our way through Lynda Barry’s book Making Comics.

4. I’m also curious to see what other people are doing. A friend told me about a class she was taking online. I thought it sounded like fun. I then remembered that I had bought that class a few weeks earlier and had put it on the back burner for a while. Her mentioning it made me dive back in and now that’s what I’m doing every evening.

5. Making space for learning about art is so important to me and so once a week I do a deep dive into someone’s art/craft. These days that might mean a virtual art tour, pulling a book from my shelf and drawing or creating from it… I’ve also started combing magazines for images and creating files for inspiration so that’s like stealing/finding the time when I’m doing other things (organizing).

6. I like to engage in challenges, like the 100 Day Project or Inktober because I love seeing what other people have done. It is so inspiring for me… so I have to admit that I generally keep these projects short (meaning how long I devote to them each day). It’s not that it’s not worth it, it’s just that there are so many interesting things to do in this world, I often wonder who how to schedule them!

I hope you share your ideas in the comments so that I may learn further ways to nourish my creativity.

And, if you want to buddy-up to get more creative, or you’d like encouragement in the process, reach out to me, I’d love to chat!

Postscript: I hope you will take me up on my offer!

I created a product over a dozen years ago, Plan Your Fun! In essence, it’s a self-coaching program with an evergreen, week’s calendar. In the booklet, I share ideas for making space in your life to engage in play. The wall calendar is the place to post your plans for play, in this case, creativity, during the week—so that you can anticipate the events and then savor them… While the product is still on sale at www.coachingtoys.com, I am happy to offer it for free to anyone who contacts me (free shipping in the US, let’s chat about shipping outside the US).