final days forum

Will the recession steal your creativity?

This recession is sneaky.

Not content to rob the country financially, this recession aims to nab our creativity. The gift of our ingenuity is the real prize this recession season seeks. The media reports about the lingering misery of the nation's financial loss, but the news shrouds the most lethal weapon -- the underlying lie that we can't get beyond this recession.

Chaos always attempts to trample the resilient order within human beings, that part of us that says: "Wait a minute! The last time I faced this, it actually turned out OK..." or "Whoa! Remember how I actually achieved more after I lost so much?"

When we give up, when we freeze in place because of chronic problems and overwhelming odds, chaos wins.

If you're out of work, you have time to think. If you want to quit a job you're clinging to because it keeps the lights on and that's about it, take time to think. Great minds seize the freedom to conceive dreams and visions and hopes even when their lives are constrained.  Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  about a Soviet labor camp touched me when I read it in high school because of the gritty survival it depicted. And I'm still amazed by Paul, who wrote inspired words to his friends in Philippi while under what traditional scholarship says was captivity in Rome.

I have not faced a Soviet labor camp or house arrest, but stories like these and the recession itself have taught me this: Chaos may limit circumstances, but chaos can't capture my spirit unless I submit to it.

Because of this recession, much has been lost, but much more is to be gained. The American Express card may be gone, but because of creative thinking during this recession, you may reach the Dave Ramsey sweet spot where you resist all plastic. The house may be gone, but its loss may drive you to build a business that builds you a new one, not to mention houses for others.

What we do now, what we create when we fight worry with work, what we reinvent ourselves to be despite the financial ashes -- will determine how luminously we emerge when this sly recession passes.

Judy Howard Ellis

Photo: Russian writer and Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn looks out from a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, before departing on a journey across Russia. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Take a walk; feel better

Sometimes writing gets clogged.

Nothing looks right. What you energetically tap on your laptop keys sounds like an explosion of ideas, but what you read looks disjointed. Incoherent. You wonder why you write.

Resist that self-defeating emotion and take a walk. Sure, you can go to the gym and try to sweat bad writing from your pores. But that activity doesn't always stimulate a smoother creative process.

Walk and you notice things. How many birds fly overhead? Whose footprints are lodged in the dried dirt path? Are you breathing slow or fast? Does the curl of fall leaves make you think of beauty or that the year is getting away from you? If you feel like you're running out of time, slow down your walking speed. Breathe more deeply.

Remember that creativity is a gift we all have. Rediscover yours when you walk.

Make time to think

Part of a powerful creative practice is to build in time to think. Purposeless busyness is an enemy. If you are too tied-up to look at your life right-side up, you cut off future success.

Time is a tool to employ with wisdom. Use time merely to schedule tasks while never reassessing the impact of those tasks on you and your goals, and time will appear like it is never enough.

Cling to the assignment

Distraction haunts us. Ever notice how life interrupts as creative energy suddenly appears? You want to press forward to complete the project. Everything in you savors an abundance of powerful ideas showering on you like the pelting of a Texas downpour. But the dastardly, pesty issues of life conspire to throw your creative energy and your project over the cliff.

Fortitude is required to fix your mind on the assignment for the hour, day, week, month or year. Even more so, it takes all you have to complete the assignment of your life.

The difficulty of jumping

Stepping away from the comfort that a dysfunctional thing can give is hard because it's like getting from under a scratchy blanket on a cold night to retrieve the downy comforter in the closet. Do you stay in the bed and toss all night? Or do you allow yourself to leave the warm bed and endure the icy night for a few moments?

 Pursuing the creative thing that beats in all of us is like embracing the downy comforter in the closet. We know the current thing we're doing saps strength and steals joy. But that thing may be a job that pays the bills -- underwriting meager vacation days, keeping kids in good schools and the family in a nice neighborhood.

Maybe the thing is a person -- relentless in his or hers resistance to change, and this person is your spouse, friend or parent. Fear of confronting them dwarfs everything else.

Even the very thing you were born to do.

Creative joy

Authentic creativity produces an underlying joy that can leave you breathless when your life has been too pedantic; soothed when the pressures pummel you into extreme busyness; and healed when you have been wounded. Create today. Be healed.