The Mysterious Behaviour of Creativity Cat

Let’s talk about an effort today. It’s only because I sit here very intensely, behind my computer trying to think of something to write about and nothing is coming up. After thorough study of how to “do” socials correctly today, I found out that there needs to be a steady inflow of ideas from you as a content creator, otherwise you don’t exist (or to be precise you are hard to search by Google). It is not all about gaining followers, I learned. It is also about what kind of systems are employed by search engines. The system, you as a user, don’t see. And let me tell you… you thought it is scary that Google knows your eating preferences, it is much more scarier than that. And I haven’t even scratched a surface yet. But it is what it is. To fight with it with threat of global power outage (yes, you detected dystopian film reference there :D ) is futile. It is our everyday reality to be digitally present and all we have to do is to learn to live with it, use it to our advantage and use common sense to prevent misuse of it.

So, I set myself a goal of one article a week with a publishing date of Monday. Today is Monday. Which means, I stayed true to myself and keep doing everything at last call. However, the thing is, you simply cannot push creativity. It is like a cat sleeping somewhere inside of your brain, on the upper shelf, lazily waging its tail, you know it’s there but currently it’s sleeping. You cannot do much except feed it and from time to time it will wake up. So this is how it looks like inside my brain, I’m hoping the rest of you have more active cat and the effort to spark creativity is less

I used to be good in essays in school. Somehow, I always got high marks. God knows how was that even possible because when I remember writing something, anything at all, it was all torture. I remember siting down thoroughly agitated, legs moving uncontrollably, ideas and thoughts coming in in a form of F4 tornado. How does one sort through all that inlet of content? One does not is almost always an answer. Of course, I learnt in classes how to do it in theory but in reality it didn’t help and the mess in my head persisted and made only a little sense. It was huge effort to put required knowledge down on paper so it made sense to read. The guidelines I was taught were indeed amazing! I came back from class thoroughly schooled in process of writing an essay, I sat down, prepared coffee, prepared material and… ideas, like caged birds of all species, pressed on the sides of my brain and flutter all at once. It was not working.

Now, I believe I know there is a scale to it. I put everyone on scale, or to be exact I put everyone onto a graph of Gaussian function. There are people who I admire largely, authors of blogs, journalists, writers… J.R.R Tolkien. :) to whom writing comes as easily as second nature. Their brain works a tiny bit differently, they are amazing in that they are able to easily sort through all the information they had amassed. They can create a structure and make logical distribution of information. They create new worlds, new languages, teach us something new or give us hope with their immense talent for word. However, there are also people who have a mind on fire and who require a different approach. People who need to find their own voice and most importantly a way, a system that works for them. It takes a little bit more effort but it can be done. I believe there are undiscovered worlds in minds of those people. The only thing we need to do is acknowledge and accept that we are a specific type of person and the only one that there is. No one else is us and so we need to find a tailored way to function. The comparison doesn’t serve well here.

And so if the writing (or anything else for that matter) is a dream of yours but it doesn’t come to you as naturally as you imagined, just give it go. Maybe you’ll find a way. I am certainly giving it a second go ( more likely third or fourth go) here. I enjoy talking to people and sharing my ideas even if it is very difficult for me to draft an article, I always like to try.

Last thing we all need to keep in mind is that even the greatest minds could have been suffering with a task at some time or another in their live. The creativity cat, even in the best of us wants to rest from time to time. So yes, there is a scale to how much effort we need to put into a task and even that scale changes form day to day, it only means that our lives are not linear and we need to be kind to ourselves and listen to when the creativity cat really need to recharge.