let's get creative with the boring...

Today, over at Creative Every Day, we were asked to ponder how to make those icky, sticky, un-fun tasks (like organizing documents) creative?  To be honest, I never really thought about it before.  I always play music when I'm doing things like cleaning, going through papers...and I admit it, I'm that girl who makes up her own dances as she cleans her counters or sings into the mop like it's a microphone, and the germs I'm dooming to death are my audience. 

You can't cover your ears, Mr. Bacteria.  My voice is everywhere.

At work, I tend to do yoga moves intermittent to my boring, desk-forced tasks to give me a way to get out of it for a minute or two and move.  I'm sure I look ridiculous to my coworkers, but it helps me stay focused on my projects and it helps break the day down a little.

I guess the way I'm creative with those un-fun tasks is to add movement into them.

As for rewards, that part I've always been very good about.  I always tell myself that if I finish this required boring thing, I can then write whatever I want for the evening.  Or I'll sit down and doodle once I'm done with something and my brain is fried.  Or just read and daydream.

Wait...what are you trying to say?

So today's question at Creative Every Day got me to thinking.

How do you tune in to your body and hear what it has to say?

 

I started meditating in the 2009 and I've found it's been a great way for me to simply be in the moment.  I can sometimes feel the emotions and the thoughts, but it allows me a chance to quiet it all.  There is also a great meditation that I'm able to do called a body scan and it takes you through every part of your body.  It's an amazing experience, as long as you can stay awake.  Yes, I admit it, the first time I attempted the meditation, I'm pretty sure I dozed off, as I doubt I'm a meditation savant. 

 

 

 

 

While I don't dance in the rain barefoot, as I'm just not that girl, and don't want to end up in a straight jacket, I love to dance.  It's my favorite form of exercise, if one could dare to say that I enjoy exercise.  I grew up dancing.  For the longest time, I was self-taught.  My father would buy me musicals on VHS like Kiss Me Kate and Singing in the Rain and I would memorize the dance numbers and perform them for my family.  I guess that supplied the idea of "hhhmmm...maybe she would like dance classes."  So I did that for a long time.  And I still have this weird knack for picking up dance moves rather quickly.  I stopped dancing after high school and it somehow fell off my radar for a long time, but I'm glad I started up with it again.  It's like an old friend who I haven't seen in awhile, but we can pick up right where we left off. 

 

I read Twyla Tharp's book on creativity and there is a part where she talks about how our bodies just know/remember things.  She even has an exercise where, even if you're reading the book not as a dancer, she has you create an eight count of moves and do it repeatedly for a few weeks.  Then you stop for a month.  And when you go back to it, your body instinctively remembers.  I love the idea that our body can recall every move we've ever made, even if we seem to forget.

And when you do hear it, do you listen?

Body:  If only you'd listen to me...
Me:  Fa, la, la...I can't hear you.
Body:  I know what you need to do...
Me:  Fa, la, la, Ms. Know It All...

I wish the above weren't an accurate take on things, but alas, there is quite a bit of truth behind it.  For the longest time, I ignored it and a lot of the emotions running through my head, wreaking havoc on my body in response.  I'm still learning to let myself just be.  To be in the present and listen to what my body is saying.  For example, I'm currently learning how to tell when I'm actually hungry and when I'm just going to eat because I can.  Hard habit to break.  I've spent years perfecting it - time to watch a movie, must eat - and actually paying attention takes work on my part.  I'm a lazy creature by nature, so some days are harder than others.

I've been using the meditation and the dancing along with a few other tools to try to pay more attention to these things.  Hopefully, it will pay off in the end.

Creative Every Day Challenge

The bright side to bronchitis, being home from work for a week, and bored out of my skull was that I could do small snippets of writing and journaling, even really bad doodling in my notebook.

I also managed to get my morning pages (3 handwritten pages) in every morning for The Artist's Way. I look back over those and they always tend to be about the most random things, usually bits of dreams I had since I just woke up. I also think it's the one place where I don't edit myself. I'm the girl who has to go back over and over every line she writes as she goes, willing it into perfection. It's one of my constant battles when I write. I could spend hours on one page of dialogue in a first draft.

That's part of the reason I signed up for this challenge. I'm hoping if I just let go, I can create.

Anyway, the theme for january is the body. So I've been trying to write little snippets focusing on different parts of the body. Some days I'm able to incorporate it into the current novel I'm working on, but other days, I just write little ficlets. Nothing I'm quite ready to share (going back to that perfectionist thing) because I'm not sure a lot of what I wrote when I was hopped up on meds. Also, a lot of it is really personal at the moment. The first anniversary of my mother's death is this month and I'm trying to use creativity and writing to deal with a lot of emotions.

In attempts to get the muses working

2009 was not my finest year as far as my writing goes. And I also realized over the course of the year, that I would love to be creative in other ways aside from writing - photography, drawing, painting, crafts. Maybe it's the Virgo in me or the way I was raised or a mixture of many things, but I've always believed that if it doesn't come easily, I shouldn't do it.

But that seems like I'm limiting myself so much. I'm not saying I expect to draw anything I would ever share with anyone else, but I think it would be nice to be able to do it on the simplest level.

So along with doing the Soul Cafe prompts, I'm participating in the 2010 Creative Every Day Challenge