“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.”
― Miles Davis
Deep inside all of us is the desire to make things. Whether it’s a meal, a video, an origami swan, or a website, we were made to make stuff.
Some are great at taking wood and crafting a table or skateboard.
Some are gifted at combining words and musical notes and crafting a song that lifts the listeners’ hearts.
Others are talented with numbers and code and are on their way to inventing the next software breakthrough.
There are many obstacles in our way these days—actually, there always have been. Being creative takes time, effort, and trial and error.
It takes resilience to keep going when things don’t turn out the way you want.
It takes patience—nothing great was created in a moment.
Most of us don’t have much time in our days, the will to try, or the ability to sustain trial and error to make something out of our imaginations.
Throw AI into the mix, and why should we create anything? A program can do it for us in half a second.
That’s precisely why we must create, paint, draw, sing, write, and dance. The force of gale winds is pressing down on humanity to stop.
Stop making things.
Stop using your hands, feet, and imagination. Just sit down, turn on the TV/Switch/laptop, consume content, and go to bed.
The threat to stop being human is genuine. And we need to wake up to it. Computers and machines might be able to do things faster, but they will never replace the heart, soul, and spirit behind the art.
When we write a poem, tap dance across the floor, or film our friend trying to land his first skateboard trick, we are being creative, human, and fully alive.
Filmmaker Joss Whedon says, “Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”
It will push us out of our comfort zones.
It might require us to get up early in the morning, before the day starts, before the to-do lists begin, to have space to dream, imagine, and invent.
It might take days, weeks, months, or years. It might take edit after edit after edit. But before you know it, you have something you did with your hand, mind, heart, and spirit.
You have the perfect peach pie after trying a dozen combinations of ingredients.
You have the best painting of a desert when you can create.
You have a finely tuned song ready for an audience.
You have passed from just consuming to creating. And it isn’t about money at this point. It’s being alive. It’s about being God’s created representative on this planet, doing what only humans can do.
Don’t disparage this act of defiance at this moment. It’s needed to thrive as God’s created sons and daughters.
I’ll end with one more quote from the world’s most outstanding cartoonist of the world’s most excellent cartoon, Calvin and Hobbes:
“We don’t value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there’s no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We’re not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!”
― Bill Watterson, There’s Treasure Everywhere
See you next week,
Chris
