Inculcating creativity everyday and not just during a lockdown

As the world entered lockdown mode, we suddenly saw trends around cooking, drawing, playing instruments, creating comics, reading, blogging emerge. Everyone started talking about dedicating some serious time to their hobbies. We also had social media and adulation from friends there to keep us going.

As someone who enjoys having many creative hobbies- from origami to learning the piano, I began to wonder why it took others a lockdown to get back to things they might have enjoyed in childhood. Rather, I wondered if I had been living some kind of a lockdown life all along :).

I think the lockdown made everyone do one thing: hit PAUSE and take stock of their lives. It was like all the noise from the running around we do went away. We could sit and hear the birds chirp and hold a mirror to ourselves. It also made us question on what we skills and hobbies we always wanted to develop but never made time for.

While we could not go out to restaurants, meet friends, go camping or travel to a new place, we also looked for novel ways of getting some downtime. This is what brought us back to our hobbies.

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Diving deep into a creative pastime is an inward looking cure for the constant restlessness in us. It is meditative and perhaps the silver lining of the lockdown- this realisation that we don’t need to constantly run around to feel fulfilled.

The internet offers an infinite universe of ideas, people to connect with, get inspiration and learn technique from. We don’t need to leave home for a large part of it. Another pleasant side-effect is that this saves the environment too in some ways- by reducing our carbon footprint.

It even ties into (what I have written previously on) the worry that our jobs will be replaced by machines. In that last sphere of human ability that we can guard from the machines, creativity definitely occupies a very high place.

When we tap into ourselves and create something that never existed before, it’s beautiful and it makes us feel alive. So let us keep continuing what we have started as part of a lockdown here and keep the children and the artists in us alive.

So where does one start- here is where we use the tricks we read about in pop-psychology books-

1. Start by doing it 5 minutes a day, trick the brain into thinking of it as a very small activity and overcome mental inertia.
2. Then, gradually increase it by a few minutes everyday to just keep still fun for you and not a burden.
3. Keep a track of your progress by writing it down somewhere or using an app or a training program. You can use social media to remain disciplined for e.g I have announced a my goal of reading one book a month by declaring it there and feel a bit embarrassed if I don’t live up to it.
4. Have an end goal in sight- say “I want to be able to play Bella Ciao on my Piano in a month”
5. Follow the hashtags, join online communities, cheer for one-another or get inspiration from.

Hope this was useful to inspire you to do create something everyday :)

P.S. To quote a very nice line by John Keats (and from the Dead Poet’s Society) “And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” I would extend what is said about poetry above to every work of art.