Warming up the creative juices

Everrything takes a bit to warm up.

I always forget that things need warming up.

The voice.

The body.

The brain.

I think this is something we realize as we get older.

When you’re young, you can hop out of bed, ready to go.

When you’re older (and I’m blessed to have a body that behaves like it’s even older than it is), you have to take things a bit slower and help yourself out of bed, stretch it slowly, in my case literally warm up my back with a heat pack.

And then perhaps you must stretch and do some gentle yoga. Take a moment to merge the breath and the body, and allow the mind to sink in.

When you’re older you understand that this sort of preparation is the key to the rest of the day, to the rest of the week, to the rest of your life.

So you begin to take it seriously.

What if we did this with our creative work? Laying the foundation correctly.

Things I do to warm up by creative practice.

I meditate first thing in the morning. I do it fairly quickly 5-10 minutes, with the hope of taking a mid day meditation time, which helps me rest my mind and my body which tends to need to restoration around mid day after lunch.

I read other people’s connected work. I read the people who have spent years and lifetimes crafting their work, from the same place I am trying to craft mine, mine soul.

Then I walk.

Then I begin.

It could be any number of creative activities I try.

Taking time to learn a new skill (perhaps watching a YouTube tutorial on creative techniques I might use in music, or web work, or a creative client).

Or maybe I work on the ending of my play- for the 100th time, hoping it informs and unlocks some sort of brilliance in me.

The key for me is in taking short creative strides, mixed with longer moments of rest. Rest could mean anything: doing the dishes, taking a nap, dusting the piano, reading a blog article. Rest, medium warm up again of something inspired, and then a short creative sprint again.

Sometimes, if I know I need to sell a ticket to something, I need to pump myself up to gather courage. It never really gets easy to invite people to your work. It’s the single hardest thing I do.

So, I my drink some caffeine, get my body to perhaps feel a bit overly confident, just long enough to get that date out and secure the commitment.

This also might look like other types of concrete actions that are hard for creatives to do: building a website, buying event insurance, renting sound equipment. Purchase the easel . All of these mundane steps can hold us back from the act of creation. So better to do them in sprint like fashion, (as in I have five minutes to do this) and go!

These bite size moments of bravery keep me going.

They help sustain me, when the road is lonely and difficult.

It’s a longer path than my younger self would like. She wants things to be immediate. She doesn’t really care if it’s messy, instead she’d like to create in a whirlwind of mania.

But this leaves her sick, and depleted, and not at all whole.

So the older, slower, wiser me must now makeup for all the time lost by the younger, faster, clever me: because in the end there is a deficit.