How Constraints Can Fuel Your Creativity?

Constraints always seem suffocating, stifling and unfair; “like running a relay race with your ankles tied together.” Despite what they appear to be, constraints can be mightily making us resourceful, inventive, and more grateful for the things that we are denied in the process. 

Pic: @cristina_gottardi/unsplash.com

What would have made of us if life buttressed and backed us with ampleness, no hurdles, magnificent aromas to smell and endless colours to touch?

May be extremely sufficient for us, not to understand gluttony and greed – the lowly gravestones of this earthly life we are living! The lack of things is seen as they would hold us back, make us more diminutive – but instead it can become a launch pad to re-examine our priorities, making us more decisive and laser-focused in creating.

Thus, creativity can be a delight when it is practised in margins, within constraints. Like having certain deadlines, future goals, and limited resources. To let the art (writing in my case) sit in a capacity and context. Father Jack King, says, “If you have no vision for something that is good, true, and beautiful, persevering through adversity and failure wouldn’t make any sense. But it’s a passionate vision for creating or enjoying beauty that drives you to dogged determination in the midst of adversity. That’s why artists persist in their craft. They long to see the song, poem, or painting hidden in their souls come into being. It’s why parents endure long, difficult days and sleepless nights with their children…”

Our creative tools may differ but we are all creatives in one way or another:

As creatives, most of us are used to seeing creativity in words, art or music. But then there were creatives like Orville and Wilbur Wright, famously known as the Wright Brothers, who found creativity in an attempt to fly like a bird, and then later succeeded in inventing an aeroplane. Before the Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903, other creatives made copious attempts to make bird machines and fly. The good old kites, hot air balloons, airships, and gliders remained our artificial wings until then!

It might sometimes feel that life is significantly harder and meaningless in the way things go and the bearings devour us, but honestly, the creative processes are blurred in these regular specs of life. Creativity is dealt with in its nuances, making it into a flow, in our vulnerabilities and in most circumstances not knowing the end.

What are you creating? A happy family, babies, a home, relations, a new recipe, a macrame, a painting, an origami or just silly long and short shadows under the sun? Whether we hold a brush in our hand, type words on the keyboard, or make several failed attempts to bake a perfect loaf of bread, we are all creatives.

So do not leave in the middle, when you have walked enough, but walk a little more so that you will find your warm-lit home in the Winterland.

Creative people are among you and me. Moreover, you and me.

You may like to read: Poem on Creation