When I was in undergrad, I blogged incessantly on my tumblr. I shared songs, pictures, videos, and quotes that I thought were cool, and my reflections on all of those things. Sometimes I even shared my own songs, pictures, and videos. But I’m not exactly sure how I wrote so much. Being a music therapy major and music technology minor, I was taking 18-20 hours a semester on paper, but more like 100 hours in reality. So, I didn’t exactly have time. But I somehow managed to make time for it squeeze it in between classes, ensembles, ministry, and intramurals.
I specifically remember one night, sitting on the porch of Atkinson hall (lined by our famous Georgia College columns), where I just couldn’t finish writing a paper that was due the next day. My brain was fried and it was starting to rain. At that point, I should have packed up, left, gotten some sleep, and finished in the morning. But instead, my brain was magically no longer fried, and it wanted to wait out the rain by cranking out a blogpost about how I played “You are My Sunshine” 5 times in 45 minutes at one of my clinical practicum sites earlier that day.
That post ended up being one of my more popular ones.
But to be honest, I never actually wrote with the intention to get likes. It was just this need to process and share. This need to take everything going on in my brain and heart and get it out of there… or sometimes even just to push it aside for a few moments. But it wasn’t really a need to just put a bunch things on a platter and shove it into the world. It was a need to take those things and turn it into something a little more aesthetically pleasing…and then offer the world the option to partake in it.
It was a need to create.
And I absolutely loved it. I wrote, I played, I designed, filmed, I edited… I did anything and everything I could do. To quote Albert Einstein, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
But then grad school hit, and all I did was write papers.
And then I poured everything into the Life EP, and I didn’t have any more energy to song write after it was released.
And then I started working, and creating became my profession.
I (re)created music, video, graphics, written content, etc. I even learned how to create things I never wanted to know how to create, like stories, plays, stage lighting, registration forms, curriculum, and, the worst of all… PROGRAM BUDGETS. Ugh.
So, while I get to create for work, I’ve forgotten how to create for fun.
But, the funny thing is, in the past months, I’ve seen many friends start remembering how to do just that. (Thank you, by the way).They’ve joined community choirs, bands, taken up wood-working, started podcasts, and so much more. Its so amazing the stuff that people create. And its inspired me to get back into it to. Not out of desire for fame, but the thrill of the process and the fulfillment of the product.
I’m doing this.
Creating time to create for fun.
P.S. Here’s a video I made this weekend