The Waiting Room

When it comes to your creativity, are you sitting in the waiting room?  You may have settled in there waiting for someone else to grant you permission to make art. You may be waiting for more time, money, inspiration, guidance. Whatever you are waiting for, imagine if it never arrives? Imagine if your name is never called? What then?

You would have to get up and leave the waiting room. What you came for has not arrived. You are going to have to choose yourself. No more waiting. What does this look like? It could look like going out and buying the sketchbook and pencils and deciding that you will carry it with you everywhere you go and if you get five minutes you are going to open it up and put pencil to paper.

It could look like connecting with a friend who you know shares your love of the arts, and committing to meeting up once a month to talk about all the creative ideas you both have and what you could do to action them. 

It might look like a hundred different things, but the one thing that it will not look like is waiting. You will not have outsourced something as important and valuable as your creativity to any force outside of yourself. You have decided to firmly take control of that. 

We have so many areas in life where we have no say in what happens. Life leads its own way and we navigate it the best we can in all weathers. But the elements that reside within out hearts and souls is for us to lead. We are the ones that get to take charge of that desire and put it into action. 

It doesn’t have to be grand gestures or leaps forward. It can be in the slightest adjustment to your day or habits that allows a sliver of art into your world, where you allow yourself to let the flow of words come through you and you pen a poem. 

One of the reasons we take ourselves off to the waiting room is because we set such high expectations for our creative explorations. We decide we want to make art and we simultaneously decide it must be the best art ever created. That we must exceed all our expectations. That we must prove to ourselves how good we really are. If we can’t meet these guidelines, which no one can, then we don’t start, instead, we wait. 

We wait for inspiration to strike with such fervour that we expect ourselves to be taken over by some creative spirit that will upskill our art and create a masterpiece on our first attempt. We await the right feeling, we will know when we are meant to be making art, because we will feel it in our bones. 

What if it doesn’t work that way? What if you begin to create and in turn that creates a feeling of wanting to make art. What if you begin with a creative mess and make terrible art consistently and then after a while you begin to see improvements? What if it is all the opposite way around? 

There is only one way to find out. If you sense that you have been in the waiting room, then it is time to leave and go and experiment instead. You are allowed to leave, you are allowed to decide to play and explore your creativity without demands for perfectionism. It is your birthright and you are not required to wait, ever. Your creative dreams are a gift to you and would never have visited you if all the ingredients for the outcomes did not already reside within you. You get to mix those ingredients in a way only you can and make the art only you can and have permission to make a mess and create art you don’t even like because it is part of the journey to becoming the artist you desire to be. 

Nothing gets created in the waiting room, ideas just float in mid air asking for breath. You are the life force that can breathe life into them. That is your job as an artist. 

When it comes to your creativity, are you sitting in the waiting room. You may have settled in there waiting for someone else to grant you permission to make art. You may be waiting for more time, money, inspiration, guidance. Whatever you are waiting for, imagine if it never arrives? Imagine if your name is never called? What then?