6. Creative Flows
April 25, 2025 Creative flows
As I have tried different things over the past 18 months, on this journey to find myself and to forge a path forward, I have started to see some patterns and new observations that I was not aware of before. For example, I never thought of myself as creative. I was told that as a Leo, I have a natural tendency towards creativity. But, in my career, the Leo in me came out as a leader, an analyst, a do-er. My husband and I would talk about how we were creative in the way we solved problems at work and at home, and that seemed to fit the bill for me in terms of creativity.
However, as I have shifted away from the story that I have absorbed over my lifetime of what is expected, and into my own Kara-led story, my creativity has popped. I’m writing and drawing from a place inside me that has been held but not breached since I was a child. I kept hearing people saying – find your flow – find the thing that as you do it, time stops and you can be entirely absorbed by that activity. I don’t think I had anything like that – except reading – until recently. Now, I can spend minutes, hours, with paper and colored pencils. I can spend hours with a journal or at the computer writing. Ideas form somehow inside me and bypass my mind – moving right from my spirit to my fingers. I used to sit and think about what to write – now I sit down and let it flow out of me.
As part of that tapping into that creative inner part of myself that does not live at the surface, I have learned how important silence is. Not silence in the sense of no noise, but silence in the sense of no one engaging me. No one talking to me. Not taking care of anything except what I’m looking at right now. That ability to turn my entire bandwidth of attention towards one thing unlocks my inner artist in a way that excites me. Thrills me honestly. Makes me feel like a kid again. I have learned that I need to take myself out of my regular environment to do this best. So, if the house is busy and noisy and constantly needy, I go to the library, or a park, or a coffee shop. I go to a place where I am just me, not someone’s mom or someone’s wife or even someone’s friend. Just Kara.
I have also learned that I need hours, multiple hours, in order to tap in. One hour, or 90 minutes, does not suffice. If that’s all the time I have, I will use that time for more routine tasks like paying bills, correspondence, errands. I wander into my creative zone only when I have 3 hours or more. When the kids were little and I was working full time, this was an impossible ask. I didn’t have it. And I felt frustrated. But I got by. Like we do. Now that I have less structure, I have more control over my time, and I can set aside time to find that inner creative artist, and see what she comes up with. But I will tell you, it is still hard. Patterns are hard to break. Uncomfortable to break, for me an for others. But I do it because it’s important.
My current routine is to take 2 weekdays each week, and set aside 5 hours for writing. I mark it as “writing” on my calendar, but it also includes time to draw, read, peruse old journal entries, putter. Sometimes I start a little late, but that’s ok because I have 5 hours set aside. Often I’ll stop in the middle for a little mental and physical break – I’ll take the dog outside for a quick walk or clean the bathroom. But then, back to it.
In addition to regular time that is mine and mine alone, I’m also working on creating my own space. This again seems like it should be easy for me to do now, but is taking time. I’ll get there. I’m laying down new neuron paths, new spaces in my brain. One of the keys to staying young I think is being willing to try new things – to be a little uncomfortable, to not always be sure of what I’m doing. It feels good. Less stagnant, less stuck, more growth.
