Creative New Year Re-Solutions
I love the sense of a 'clean slate' that a New Year gives you. You can draw a line under the previous year and say, "Hey, that's over with. Now I can start afresh."
You may feel like you have been bashing your brains out throughout the previous year trying to figure out a better way ahead. And you can end up at the end of the year feeling frustrated, as though nothing has really worked. But come the 1st of January, the start of a New Year, you can forget all that. You can attack your problems and your challenges anew. You can come at them afresh. And that is a wonderful creative state to be in.
The New Year gives you the chance to resolve to be more creative, to come up with the answers, to come up with the solutions. You really can come up with New Year Re-solutions... you come about the solution in a different way, you re-visit it, you re-look at the things you are doing, you re-look at the challenges you are facing. You come at them from a different angle, you approach them from a different direction. And you have different insights about it. You come at it with a fresh energy, it's a NEW year. You can forget the past. You can sweep it away. You don't have to carry the history of what you've done before with you.
And that's what creativity often requires: this ability to come at things as though for the very first time.
The history of a thing, the history of a challenge, the history of a problem that you are facing, a business problem or challenge of that nature can thwart you in your efforts, it can frustrate you before you've even begun. You can feel like, "Well, I've tried all these different things before, and none of them worked, and therefore nothing I come up with is going to work, so what's the use?!" And you give up, you become hopeless.
Well, that's not going to give you the creativity you need to progress to the next level, to come up with the solutions that will take you forward in life.
So, the New Year really is an opportunity to be fresh, to be creative, to think in an innovative way. It enables you to get ahead, to progress, and this sense of the NEW Year, this sense of renewal, is something that is very important to cultivate in your creative life. Because we do become bogged down by what we've done before, by ideas that we've thought before, and often we wend up 'arguing for the limitations' of what we've thought before.
Get a sense with this New Year, get a feeling, of creative renewal, the idea that you can put the past behind you and that you can look with fresh eyes, with a clean slate, at the things that you have to do.
Allow yourself to really get a sense, a really strong inner feeling, of that creative potential, because it's an opportunity for you to really connect with the creative power within you, with the creative energy within you, and to feel it in its raw state. And then to go and look at your life, look at your business, look at your creativity, your art, your expression, with new eyes. Let the New Year be almost like a rebirth for you.
And talking of creative renewal, you want to carry that through into the month with you. You can't afford to wait for the New Year, every year, you have to be able to create this state of creative renewal, this state of freshness. And how are you going to do that?
Well, you are going to use the turning of the days, and the weeks, and the months. When it's a new month, that can be your time of refreshment. When it's a new week, that provides an opportunity to come at things in a new way. This new day, this new hour, every moment, really, is an opportunity for creative renewal. If... you can be in the moment, if you can be really here.
That leads me into wanting to tell you about a book that I was reading last night. It has a great title. It's called: "Lucid Living: A book you can read in an hour that will turn your world inside out
" by Timothy Freke. This little book, as its title suggests, is quite short. But the writing is so alive. It's so full of dynamic, creative energy, so full of freshness. It reminds me of this New Year in that the words are living: they will carry you into an altered state of mind, into an expanded state of mind.
(And, again, that's another aspect of creativity, this ability to alter your creative state of mind at will if you can.)
The argument or thrust of the book is about becoming more aware, becoming more lucidly aware, becoming fully present in this eternal moment NOW.... And allowing that awareness to expand your understanding of who and what you are, so that you see that you are not just this physical body but that you are this pure awareness in which everything is happening. As the book says, you are an experiencer of experiences. I urge you to seek out this little book. It is, as I say, a very short read but a very powerful one.... Lucid Living: A book you can read in an hour that will turn your world inside out
Now as creative people, we are always looking for experiences that can expand our mind, give us a fresh insight on life, give us a fresh perspective on life, because changing your perspective enables you to think creatively. It stretches and pulls and opens your mind so that you can see this life in a creative way. It gives you more flexibility in your mind, in your thinking space, so you can come at the world from many more different angles. That is such a powerful thing to be able to do.
So we seek out experiences, ideas, thoughts, knowledge, anything that can help to lever open our mind that little bit more, give us a greater understanding, expand our sense of who and what we are and what we are capable of. I think that Timothy Freke's book, Lucid Living, really fits that requirement and, yeah, I recommend it. Check it out!
Now, the New Year, it's a challenging time. Traditionally people talk about New Year Resolutions, it's a time when people come at their lives again, they assess their lives and ask, "How's it going? Have I achieved my goals? Am I any nearer to being where I want to be? What's stopping me from being happy, healthy, successful and fulfilled in my life?"
And they make an assessment of where they are, and they plot, they make a resolution, they resolve to do certain things differently. And this is kind of filtered down, and most people make a half-hearted effort (if they make any effort at all). They might decided that they are going to try to cut back on the amount of fattening foods that they eat, or the amount of alcohol that they drink, or cigarettes that they smoke, or whatever....
But really, you know, we only have this one life, and everyday should be a creative challenge to live it better. We don't need New Year. New Year is just a reminder that life is a challenge, and life is about creative renewal: challenging the habitual ways of thinking and doing and living our lives.
I liked Michael Masterson's recent article for Early to Rise on January 1st, entitled: Kicking Off The New Year With ETR: Prepare To Accomplish The Unthinkable.
In this article, Masterson writes about a New York Times article in which a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, called Suzan-Lori Parks, decided to do the unthinkable and write a play a day for a whole year. And every single day throughout 2002 she wrote a whole play. And some of them were really short but she went for it, she challenged herself to do that every single day.
And Michael Masterson suggests that you give yourself a similar challenge, to come up with something really incredible, something almost unthinkable. It might be to read an educational book a day. Make a sale a day. Write a poem a day. Come up with a song a day.
It's almost like that thing I wrote about in the articles on Thomas Edison, about having an Idea Quota. And Thomas Edison had this incredibly demanding Idea Quota ...and it's a similar sort of thing where you challenge yourself to rise above and beyond to do something incredible every day for a whole year or however long you want to do it.
Now, it doesn't have to be for a whole year, I like the 30 day principle myself. I like to challenge myself to do something for 30 days. Did it recently with giving up TV, giving up newspapers. At the moment, I'm on a raw food only 30 day test. But doing something for a whole year is gutsy and I admire that. Fitness guru Matt Furey writes about some of his students setting themselves the challenge of performing 100,000 Hindu squats in a year (about 274 a day!).
So look at this day, look at this New Year, this new month, this new week, this new moment... and come at it afresh. Go at it with dynamic life. Decide to live it more creatively than ever before. And remember that challenge every day. Just do things a little bit differently every day. Shake things up a little everyday.
And I wish YOU and YOUR family a scintillating, creative and thus very Happy New Year!
My Very Best Wishes To You,
Wily
