It’s been too long since I’ve put pen to paper, or the clack of keyboard input to a blinking cursor that mocks me, waiting and waiting for my creativity to find its way to my uninspired fingertips and put letters, words and meaning on this white space… It blinks and blinks shouting ‘I’m ready for you… what next…?’ over-eager and with no respect for the ‘craft’ or the process.
“I’m thinking!” I shout back at its blinky arrogance with a deep insecure sigh.
The problem with inspiration is that it’s not constant. We use the word ‘inspired’ as an adjective, but really it’s a temporary and rare state of consciousness… At lest for me. Sometimes we even use ‘inspired’ to describe people… ‘He was an inspired individual’, but in actual fact inspiration and creativity ebb and flow in unpredictable patterns. Sometimes it strikes unexpected in a moment of 3am insomnia, sometimes on a mundane train commute home from the office, yet it suddenly becomes shy, mysterious and allusive when you sit down at your desk to ‘write’.
So how can you live an inspired and creative life? Just living seems to take up too much time in the day to allow for some lofty hours to create something. I’ve recently moved back to Sydney and started a new job. It’s been 7 weeks since going back to the nine to five existence and it’s no coincidence that I haven’t written anything since starting my new role. It’s been two months of immense change and shifting of family, furniture, boxes and mind-set… There’s simply been ‘no time’ to indulge in unnecessary activities that aren’t essential for daily life. When you’re stuck like this, how do you find space within the mundane to create?
Inspiration and creativity seem to flow with ease when life is stimulating. This happens when you travel, experience a life event and feel passionate about a particular topic… But what about when life is ‘mundane’? What about when the the familiar and the repetitive become the daily norm? Working in a corporate existence with my daily commute, meetings and daily stuff doesn’t exactly throw up creative content on a plate!
I’m thinking that the key is; to see the beauty in the mundane, find the chaos in the organised and the absurd in the normality of life… It is said that a true artist is able to see life objectively, to remove the lens of what we ‘know’ to be and once you’re able to do this everything becomes vibrant, alive and new. To see the mundane in this way requires a giant step backward into the realm free from labels, judgement and subconscious processing and into the realm of objective un-bias observation. Perhaps once we achieve this we will see that the mundane isn’t so mundane after all, but full of wonder and beauty.
Sounds easy right? Not always! On this theme I’ve put together a gallery of my photos of ‘mundane’ things… The every day. There’s no images of the Colosseum, Time Square or the Golden Gate Bridge here… Just moments of beauty in everyday life, that I captured in an instant.
How do you deal with the mundane? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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