Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Finding Joy and Creativity in the Exercise of Writing

I have grown to love writing in the morning and am so glad that I began this exercise. I never dreamed how helpful it would be. 

It was an agonizing beginning. It felt as if I had to fumble around in my brain for something to say and then P-U-L-L out those resistive, reluctant words that grabbed on to the edges of my mind and refused to come out. 

I wrote anyway. 

Stupid, inane, vacuous words that seemed pointless. 

But once I chipped away at the barrier of the perceived barrenness, I found thoughts that had been slumbering under the everyday. As I wrote and peeled away the layers of the day to day routine, laying it down on paper and freeing it from the cycles of the thought processes, I found there was room for deeper, obscured thoughts to rise to the surface. Undiscovered treasures that I have been mining each morning. 

I've discovered that if I don't practice the discipline of slowing my thinking to the pace of writing, the fingers of my brain simply rifle through my thoughts, lightly touching the surface of them, flitting and flickering; dancing and darting, but not taking the time to probe to any depth. 
This longhand scribbling every morning demands my brain to slow it's pace reaching into depths I didn't acknowledge in my mad scramble to "fix" puzzling problems. I can obsess over the little snags and tangles that come from living life, leaving myself confused and frustrated. Setting down these things on paper helps me work out the snarls of thought and oftimes work out a solution. That had been waiting in the wings the while time. 

Much to my surprise, I've fallen in love with this process. I've had freedom to explore my musings, opinions, feelings, desires about myself-of who I am, and who I'd like to be. 

Creativity. Ideas. Personal expression. Expressing my individuality with playful abandon. 

And it has been there all the time. 
Hidden in the labyrinth of my thoughts. 

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