Following my exhausting school trip last Friday-Saturday (see past recounting of roommates who sleep with the TV on), I didn’t really have a chance to catch up on my sleep–never mind suitably sleep following a typical week of school/work that tends to leave me with a deficit on its own. I piled another week’s deficit on top, and then this past weekend, I slept.
No, really. This past weekend I slept. I was asleep by 8 pm on Friday, and slept in till about 11:30 am on Saturday. Then I took a nap Saturday afternoon. And, yes, I did still sleep Saturday night.
Sunday morning around 6 am, I woke up suddenly with a strong urge to create. Not like “oh, look at me, I’m so original,” but like my hands needed. to. make. My mind was whirling with ideas and plans, and it was only, like, 45 seconds since I’d woken up.
Distantly, I thought over the last however-long it’s been since I’d started school. . .any time I’d ever had a few consecutive days off– enough time to sufficiently re-organize and re-boot my system–the desire to create would come rushing back. You know that little white plastic pop-up timer in those roaster birds? It pops up, and you know it’s done cooking? Creativity seems to be my pop-up timer. That’s when you know my system is somewhat back in balance. It’s a good thing.
The sad thing is how rarely over the past however-long I’ve felt the urge to create. Could I make time? Time can almost always be “made,” if one applies enough brute force. But it doesn’t matter, not when your desire, itself, to create dissipates like so much morning mist, and where it goes nobody knows.
Fight-or-flight is a coping mechanism, they say. Your body shunts away blood from many important organs in order to give your fighting/flighting muscles a better chance at actually accomplishing it’s goal. True, that. But so does your brain. Fight-or-flight, and the ability for higher thought disappears. Chronic Acute Stress Syndrome, and other things, much more silently, disappear. We might not even notice they were gone until they come back.
I recognize the usefulness of such cognitive shelving. Who could juggle stressful situations/packed schedules if they were constantly distracted by the need to set it all aside and use their hands to cause something to come into being? But I do recognize, too, that creativity was never meant to be suppressed for long amounts of time. Some would say that creativity is not a basic life function, but I wonder. The Creator created us in His image. How can we not create?
I recognize the current need for such a sacrifice. But it is hard not to yearn for the day when my urge to create is not met with self-surprise. . .and left un-fulfilled.
You are smart, they say. Well, if God has given me a measure of intelligence, then I must count myself blessed. But God is more than smart, and His gifts are diverse. He has given other measures to me, and find I hate to leave them buried in the dirt. They aren’t forsaken, just laid aside. . .or maybe even misplaced. Someday I will find them again, and maybe others besides.