The Creative Mind

During the past few days, I’ve been in a bit of a slump.  I’ve been sleeping a lot, lazing around in all my free time, and just generally feeling low and grumbly.  I couldn’t figure out why exactly—things are winding down for the year, so I don’t have very much to do.  I’ve already decided not to worry very much about finding a job or an apartment (at least in theory) and I don’t think that’s the cause.  For a long time, I thought I was just being sulky, as every human being has a right to be every once in a while.

But there was more to it, as I’ve discovered today.  Thinking about it this morning, I remembered the last time that my slump lifted—when I started to rearrange files on my computer in preparation for a new writing project.  Seems strange, but it’s true: even doing that little bit of work gave me an energy and an optimism I had been missing.  I realized then that this listless feeling has persisted because I am a writer who is not writing. 

Pearl Buck once described the creative mind as a creature of sensitivity, someone who absorbs everything around him or her in acute detail.  This “cruelly delicate organism,” Buck says, also has the need to create, as a way of sustaining the self, for “without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…”  I am like that.  I have a need to make something beautiful, or if not beautiful, at least powerful.  Be it words or music, something has to come out of my soul every day, or my subconscious mind feels like it has failed the world.  For a writer, or for any artist, the worst feeling in the world is the absence of motivation and inspiration.  Even writing this little bit soothes the itch that I couldn’t scratch.  Now that I am aware of the consequences of ignoring this need, I can take better care of myself. 

How interesting it is to me, that humans have evolved beyond simple survival—to continue to exist, we must feed our minds and our souls, or we will waste away in a feeling of meaninglessness.  It’s too bad that we don’t know how to sustain our mental and emotional needs as well as we could.  Maybe if we did, the world would be a happier place, or at least an easier one to understand.