Why are so many people driven to create these days?
I wonder if it's because it's a natural way to focus on one thing at a time, and to engage deeply in it.
This type of activity may be especially important for introverts, who often experience sensory overload. The focused attention required to reproduce a landscape accurately in a painting, or to express a complex idea in the limited rhyming verses of a song, provides a kind of respite from a world that seems to lack focus.
Just the act of "ordering" itself, as was recently pointed out in an article called "Writing Through Adversity", written by Paula Guran and shared in Writers.com, can be therapeutic, either serving as a proxy for a disordered world or, perhaps, creating a blueprint for ordering the life we find ourselves in.
Art can offer a narrative, a cohesive story. When our lives don't seem to have that purpose and story and meaning, we create new ones, either as substitutes for the real thing or to teach ourselves how it's done.
I notice in my own life, I've used songwriting and performance as a way of enforced life simplification. When I'm singing on a stage, I can't do anything else. When I have to write a song on a deadline, I have to stay fully focused on it. Everything else falls away, which is good, because there's so much of that "everything else", I can't keep up with it anyway!
I'm happy to be writing songs, and I think they serve a purpose in the world. But I also suspect that if I lived in a slowed-down, simpler culture, I could live more comfortably without needing to escape into creative activity quite so often. As I write this, I feel it's a kind of heresy: isn't it good to be prolific? Yes, it's life-affirming and healing.
But maybe I can more often recognize the activity as a form of meditation, which is valuable in and of itself, without requiring a whole lot of other activities surrounding it which end up being clutter.
As in every song I write, the question remains: what is essential, and what can be let go?
1 comment:
An interesting thought. I've read this over a couple of times now.
I'm a traditionally over-committed sort in my lifestyle. I'll have to measure how much I tend to let that inclination affect the tunes I write.
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