With much of the world preparing to celebrate Christmas, or having just celebrated the Solstice or Hanukkah, I thought about the gift of creativity — not just in the arts, but in our lives. Working artists spend a lot of our time struggling with our creativity, bemoaning its limitations, wondering how to expand it and best use it. And so I’m sharing a few quotes from my collection that focus on the gift.
“One of your gifts as a writer is that you are a sensitive witness to the Universe.”
– novelist and teacher Johnny Worthen
“To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
“Change is a constant in your career. The gift is doing the work.“
– musician Mike Mattison
“An insight is an unexpected shift in the way we understand things. It comes without warning. It’s not something that we think is going to happen and that’s why it’s unexpected. It feels like a gift and in fact it is.”
– Gary Klein, an expert on decision-making, quoted in Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire
Thank you, friends, for sharing the gift of your creativity with the rest of us.
Thank YOU, Leslie, for these weekly explorations. I look forward to them, always. May we all be “sensitive witnesses” in the new year.
A quote to add, from the words of Henry Miller: “Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”
My pleasure, Lynne. Adding Miller’s words to my list!