The Pursuit of Creativity
As a child, one of the things I longed for was to write for a living—to string together prose and poems to incite something in people striving to live beautifully and boldly amid the mundanity we are often fed throughout the course of our lives. After college, I assumed my days would be filled with books and coffee in a big city where I might’ve made a home in the field of publishing. Instead, I found a home in a nonprofit, a job filled with words and doling out helping hands for organizations barely afloat. In a way, isn’t that all nonprofits, to some degree, a crew of workers logging long hours at sea hoping for a stretch of land to fall into sight? I can at least say that I am fortunate to be both a writer recreationally and professionally. I wield words to strengthen causes and amplify voices who are well-deserved the amplification to be heard by those who have the ability to aid in ways only capital can. I also make words to help life be a little easier to understand.
In the last two years, working my first “big girl” job, I am weary of time, feeling like it is being snatched away from me. Pulled from my fingers like some cruel game of tug-a-war, and maybe this is to do with my work environment feeling more like a battlefield than a field of communal belonging, where flowers are in full bloom and spring feels the long-awaited miracle we need it to be. Maybe it is because I am still learning to manage time in a way I never quite comprehended. I mean, I’m the girl who as a college student who had time to roam the three-story library on my campus, and in between classes, I spent minutes and hours grazing spines of books, drinking overly sweet cappuccinos until it was time for my writing classes to begin.
As a 20-something, it has become clear to me that we really do create the life we want. And I find myself questioning what it is I really want. What do I want to enjoy about this only life I get the privilege to live and inhale every possibility for a moment to be inexplicably beautiful? I often think about 2020 and how life felt simpler. We got a glimpse of what life could be outside of the surge of work without rest and play. We got to wake up and, for once, know what morning felt like outside of a commute to a job that held no space for life or air. And it is incredibly heartbreaking that this dichotomy was only experienced while simultaneously witnessing the deaths of over 100,000 people and this century’s racial awakening.
As I balance my reality with the life I crave, restlessness plays at the edge of my heart—a desire for a sense of wholeness within and around me. I sense creativity wanting to come out and play and all I can think about is how life doesn’t always make sense in this quest for healing and belonging. The more the years pass, the more the realization hits that progress is simply life. The journey is about becoming and pursuing beauty, joy, and creativity amid all the things that teach us to grasp life with both hands, interlocking fingers, and cradling grace along the ride. As the Apostle Paul so aptly captures in Philippians, “I admit that I haven’t yet acquired the absolute fullness that I’m pursuing, but I run with passion into his abundance so that I may reach the purpose for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me to make me his own.” (Philippians 3:12 TPT https://bible.com/bible/1849/php.3.12.TPT)
As the balance of being continues, I hope to carve out space for more creativity to exist. To learn to hold time, not out of fear for it passing too quickly, but to savor its essence and make the most of all that is given me— all the while pursuing creativity in the way it chooses to unfurl.
For more on this, check out my video on YouTube, Pursuing Creativity. 📸
