The Urge to Create

I’ve had a great thanksgiving with my aunt, uncle, and friends. Continuing a tradition that is over half a decade old.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday are among other things, days of consumption: Eat lots of turkey and sides then go to the stores and buy lots of things.

Even though today and tomorrow are about consumption, it is today that I’ve finally carved out the time for a little bit of time, in which I want to discuss creation.

No, I’m not talking about biblical creation, I’m talking about the innate need many, including myself, have to produce and share with the world at large, or perhaps just our communities.

I owe a small debt to Charlie McDonnell’s thoughts on being scared of his audience, and Hank Green’s response to Charlie, which pointed me to Mickeleh’s response to Charlie, and I also got to reading The Oatmeal’s indirect response to Charlie. In all of those responses, I saw myself and the past two years reflected back at me.

The urge to create is a fickle one. At times there are blog entries that demand at what time and place that they will be written, then there are those that I have to force out of my head into the keyboard.

I don’t think I talked about it here, but I spent a reasonable part of the past year trying to create a company that I believe would have changed the music world in a small, but significant way. I jumped into starting that company after a long time where my creation of content had fallen to one of its lowest levels. One could say that trying to create something a big as I wanted to, was a reaction to not having created as much as I would’ve liked to.

But Charlie, Hank, Mickeleh, and The Oatmeal note that creating is scary. The company I was working on scared and scares the shit out of me. An unpublished blog entry that has been sitting on my computer for two years scares me that it won’t be quite right. Every time, I get up and play bells there is part of me that is completely terrified that I will accidentally launch a handbell into the air that will go flying and strike someone on the head and simultaneously give them a concussion and a huge gash. (Okay, maybe I’m just scared that’ll I’ll screw up when playing bells and look at the audience like a deer staring into headlights.) Often when I sit down to create something on my own I often have to fight the urge procrastinate, which I often do by consuming content created by others.

This is why I excel at creating when I have an interdependent responsibility to others:

• Putting on a solo monologue? I suck at that.

• Being part of a theatrical endeavor where I have one, two, or forty people who are depending on me? I’m good at that.

• Sitting down and practicing piano? Eh. Not a strength of mine.

• Putting lots of hours into rehearsing handbells with others? Great at that.

Creating makes me feel good. There is the satisfaction of having brought something into the world, perhaps of beauty, perhaps of utility, perhaps something that evokes a response, or just perhaps something that needs to exist outside of the forever milling cycle of my thoughts.

Creating is part of who I am, and one of the ways in which I know I am alive.