The Mysterious Force of Creative Evolution
evolution (noun) : a process of slow change and development
Life evolves because an unseen nudge compels things to grow.
A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a baby becomes an adult, the winter becomes the spring. The caterpillar doesn’t calculate its way into flying, it simply evolves. After some time, almost imperceptibly, it becomes something different than it was before.
It’s the same way evolution wiggles its way into a painter’s brush. The mysterious force helps him to show up to the canvas day after day, waiting to see what might happen next. The brush moves, the canvas fills up, and the artist watches his piece unfold.
And then one day, something’s not quite right.
He looks sideways at the colors on the canvas.
He analyzes the textures of the paint.
His instinct rears up and he takes the piece in a whole new direction.
He wasn’t sure why he did it, he just felt like maybe he should. He follows this instinct over and over again until finally, he’s painting in a brand new way. He was compelled by a nudge.
As creatives, that mysterious force steadily shoves us closer to our most mature and most expressive state.
It’s obvious, yet completely discreet. We know that if we keep at our craft long enough, we’ll grow. We know we’ll learn more sophisticated skills, have a more discerning eye, and be sharper all around. But a successful evolution takes time and it can be so slow that we aren’t even aware that it’s happening.
Our creative evolutions can be born from our boredom or complacency. Our internal alarm goes off letting us know it’s time to switch it up. They can also be born from failures. We fail to the point where we need to find a brand new strategy to get out of the mess. Evolutions spring up out of changing our routine and shifting our perspectives for awhile — even just by meeting someone new, going somewhere new, feeling something new. All of these drivers of evolution are stealth. They hide under our day to day, but make no mistake: they’re working on us.
It’s these minuscule changes in our approach, style, or taste that start to transform our old work into our new work. If we stay in the creative game long enough, it will happen to all of us.
Out of nowhere, we’re painting in a whole new style; or we no longer want to dance in the concert, we want to choreograph the concert; or we tire of designing with the same old materials and experiment with more difficult ones. We have grown without even realizing it.
It’s frightening to shed our old habits.
It can be daunting to push out of our creative cocoons and into the wide open world. But what should be even more frightening is the idea of never evolving into something better.
