The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest living structure - teeming with 1,500 special of fish, over 200 types of birds, and 4,000 different types of coral. Incredible, hah? It’s visible from outer space! It is described as a “mosaic alive with diversity” in a breathtaking promotional video from Queensland, Australia.
Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about the struggle of the Great Barrier Reef to replenish itself due to climate change. It suffered mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017. As a result, many of the adult coral aren’t coming back. We have a huge challenge on our hands.
If our creativity is our own fertile Great Barrier Reef - how successful are we at replenishing our reserves so we can constantly expand our creativity? Our mission statement and life’s purpose? Our pursuit of worthy goals and projects? As we see in nature, we can’t use up our inner resources and expect to keep producing. We must tend to and grow our creative inner world.
Strategies for replenishing your creative self:
Identify rituals that help you feel creative. I like visiting Goodwill and Salvation Army stores because I love seeing things I never knew existed. The musky smell of moth balls and mildew get my juices flowing - seriously!
Use technology to help you store ideas so you can leave your mind open to do its best work. Scrivener ($49) is a writer’s program I love. It allows you to create folders and text files and drag them around to organize them. It backs up easily and I’ve used it for about 10 years.
Have creative ideas to report at the end of each night! Read the section about journaling in my book, Think Like a Musician!
Read books that are unrelated to your expertise.
Employ a filter mindset when consuming the news or reading books. Each morning I read the Wall Street Journal. Boston Globe, and New York Times. Well, I scan read them.I have a small notebook next to me while I read and jot down color words and new vocabulary. I use my color words for my daily word salad writing exercises. It’s a stream-of-consciousness story and I incorporate about 15 color words into the story. I like having a constant in-flux of new words. I read the paper and if any article sticks out as something related to my Think Like a Musician system or my keywords, I jot down a check mark on the article then scribble the page number on the front page of that section of the newspaper. I rarely read these articles that morning. I read them with laser focus later that evening when the kids are asleep and there’s peace and quiet! Well, and a good horror movie on in the background. This is exactly what happened with the inspiration for this post - the article about the Great Barrier Reef! My goal is to get through 3 papers and have a coffee and oatmeal - not delve into articles. Scan and move things along.