Reporting for Duty

It’s the start of week four, and it feels an age since we kicked off at SCA.

I wish I could say I was feeling more confident by the day. That with each master class, I felt a step closer to fulfilling my “creative potential.”

The sorry fact is, that’s not true.

I’d even go so far as to say the opposite is happening.  

I feel as we move forward and are introduced to more and more about creativity, its definition, and how we can access it, I move further and further away from my relationship with the word and my practising of it.

I keep coming back to this thought.  

When you join the armed forces, you go in as you.  You are Gary Ganderhand the man from Uttoxeter.  A guy who has lived however many years in his own unique way.  But, then you’re given a green uniform, a pair of boots and all your hair’s shaved off.  Over the course of the following weeks, you’ll be up at 4, instructors will scream at you, get you to climb walls, march with heavy bags on your back, and follow orders. 

They will strip you of Gary, the man who lived however many years in his own unique way and build you into Gary the soldier.

Now while the approach is very different, I feel something similar is going on here.  That I am being trained to access my creativity by first letting go of all the ways I have previously defined creativity.  Ways that are, fundamentally, not very creative and limited by the pressures we put on ourselves to conform to an idea of creativity that really isn’t defined beyond being “different” or “out of the box.” 

It is only in doing this and then practising the techniques and craft that I am being introduced to that I will end up, like Gary the solider, Mike, the Creative.

So, I must accept that in order to move forward and become that, I must first let go.