To Boost Joy and Love in Life, Make Sure Your Creativity Isn't Plugged

As a child, I was much more into imaginative play than I was into sports. I would play with toy soldiers, action figures, and their ilk for hours at a time. Almost all of that was spent alone, even when the few kids my age in the neighborhood were out playing together, I preferred to be alone.

In junior high school, I built models, did macrame, and invested an inordinate amount of time with my stamp, baseball card, and beer can collections. I curated the crap out of those things.

That version of play in junior high school was a natural outgrowth of my private imaginative play.

All that organizing I did, and making, was one of the coolest things about being human: at our best, once our needs for survival are covered, we bring order to the chaos of the world with our creativity.

Later, in high school and when I went to college, the pressures of becoming an adult suppressed my “play.” I turned to video games which, generally, entertain without bringing forth your creativity.

On top of that, the growing pressure of grades, summer jobs, and getting into college, took away opportunities for playing. Once I was in college, and dealing with the many expectations for my success, I felt pressure and went into survival mode. I didn’t know if I’d succeed in engineering, and my creative outlets were plugged.

I had so much “work” to do that I didn’t allow myself to just play. Even when I had a Commodore 64 personal computer, I still felt I had to use it to advance my work, rather than build something fun with it.

After a semester of struggles with engineering subjects (calculus, chemistry, and physics) I decided becoming a fiction writer was more my thing. Again, there was no path for that to happen, and I didn’t have the vision or the wherewithal to figure it out on my own—at least not right then.

With my creativity plugged, I did some dumb things. Young men often do dumb things, so it wasn’t surprising or outrageous. Compounding my problems was emotional immaturity (another story); suffice to say I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to make good decisions for myself or with my relationships.

I recently heard this quote from Brené Brown:

Even though I didn’t have the wherewithal to study creative writing, and instead toughed out my engineering degree, what helped me get through it was starting to write fiction.

Of course, that fiction was awful. But it was enough to get me to take a class on creative writing at the end of my schooling, and set me on a path as a writer.

Twenty years later, I would repeat those mistakes, letting my job plug my creativity, and nearly blew up my life before realizing how to move forward.

Being human is special because, at our best, we have an urge to bring order to chaos. We invent things to solve our problems. We make things to satisfy our needs. We tell stories and do “art” to inform and entertain each other.

When we suppress those creative urges, and focus on exploiting the earth, or exploiting each other, we manifest chaos. Order slips away from us and, with it, our humanity.

When you feel an urge to make something, or to be creative, indulge that urge. Whether it’s cooking, gardening, writing, or building stuff, you’re expressing your creativity.

Joy and satisfaction will follow. If you have fun and share your work, others will be entertained and inspired.

And the world will be a better place because of it.