Let us, then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labour and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
One of my favorite Longfellow lines has always encouraged me to just stop thinking so much....and just DO IT! "With a heart for any fate": Wow, it's hard to make something without knowing how it will turn out, right? We often think and postpone, procrastinate because well...it's not as hard as MAKING THE THING!
Creativity doesn't come from sitting and thinking of good ideas. Creativity comes from DOING! And Lola...she's a little active DOER. She's my inspiration, and she's what I noticed my own children...their exuberance for hands-on learning! No fear, just creating.
As an artist, I can't even tell you how much this basically sums up one of the most important skills in creativity. Get out of your head, and just start making the thing! When I was at Interlochen Arts Academy my Junior year, I was a fine art student, and I was working on this huge overwhelming painting...along side 15 other students. We weren't allowed to sit, we had to stand and work with our painting mounted to the wall...and we were only allowed to use 3 colors of oil paint. No more. And if you stopped working for too long...like to step back and think about what you were doing...she'd swat you on the bum with a stack of paint brushes. Let's just say I had a sore bum! Now, that was a specific exercise in teaching us to just GO and MAKE and discover what happened when you didn't waste time thinking so much...because thinking can often make us second guess our best selves...and we are more prone to actually never end up making or finishing anything.
Creativity takes courage. And it take DOING! Lola's "a bit much" energy is the kind of energy that I hope to talk about when we go on tour...this joie de vivre...is what will carry us to our best ideas. Fear makes us stop, think too much, and ultimately quit. As Lola would say, "Forward, Friends!"
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