Creativity is urgent and insistent. Our art, our vocations, our activism, our work in the world – it all matters. It all carries weight and significance.
But I’ve often resisted this urgency, conflating it with the demands of a hyperactive dominant culture that pushes us to be productive at all costs.
What I’ve come to realize is that our creative urgency is a different thing than the urgency of panicked striving that disregards the organic cycles and processes that support our creative energies.
Creative urgency is real – and an important thing to feel, I think. It speaks to the necessity of vision, imagination, ideas, and art in our world. And we can listen and respond to this urgency without interpreting it through the lenses of oppressive systems that will always and forever tell us we’re not enough, and that we’d better push ourselves to the edge of destruction in an attempt to prove otherwise.
The urgency of my creativity is not the urgency of capitalism (which always demands I do more, produce more, and be more), and when I feel urgency, I’ve found it super important to take a moment to discern which sort I’m experiencing. The former pulls me forward, invites me into bigness, connects me with power, and inspires vision and possibility. The latter has me preoccupied with measurement, comparison, panicked striving, and external expectation. It’s an urgency that kills the best parts of my creativity.
And so while I do ask my creativity to produce for me (as some of my work in the world asks for that), I also take intentional breaks to separate creativity and production – to set aside space free from judgment and expectation: space for process, flow, and experimentation. And perhaps most importantly, I do not ask my creativity to “prove” anything about me – my enoughness, worthiness, giftedness, etc.
Our creativity is urgent because it’s a portal through which we step into and open spaces of power, aliveness, hope, and possibility. And these are all things we need, things the world needs. So when that urgency rises up in you, pay attention and follow its lead. It’s calling for something big and important.