LifeScaping is the art of living with creativity and imagination
 The Call to be an Original
So you want a more authentic life. To feel more alive, experience more meaning and passion. You have an inner yearning that is never satisfied, or an improbable dream that won’t die. What you are experiencing is a call from your creative self, a call to create an original life and original work.
It takes courage to be original. As a result many of us spend our energies in the service of a vision that is not our own, putting our own dreams to the side. We experience a lack of meaning and a disconnection between who we know ourselves to be, authentically, and how we spend our days.
When our internal call becomes louder, more insistent, it can create feelings of confusion, panic, even depression as we struggle between the “I have to create!” voice of authentic self and the “Who do you think you are?” of our inner critic.
With courage, it is possible to turn down the volume on the inner critic, access your creativity and follow the path of imagination to create a more original and meaningful life.
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About Imagination
All of the sensory data that we receive in our lifetime exists as a huge well of images stored in memory. We use the power of imagination to draw from the well according to the needs of the current situation. We combine and recombine them in different ways in order to make sense and meaning from experience.
Imagination is the power by which we make the abstract concrete and the concrete meaningful. It is also the source of every original thing that we create.
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About Creativity
Creativity is a deep well of passion and desire. It is the impulse to follow our curiosity and see where it will lead. It is play with symbols and images. It is connecting and combining things in new and different ways.
But creativity finds its full expression in the making of things, especially things that are useful, beautiful and meaningful. Creativity yearns to be expressed in the material world. It longs to be contained in form, limited and so defined.
As creative beings we experience tension between the passion, excitement and joy of pure creative expression for its own sake and the sacrifice of freedom that is part of the process of choosing and crafting a form. But we are called to express what is original to us, and to find a form to hold it in the world.
Artists work in a kind of dance between what they can see in their imagination, and what they can create in the real world using the creative process and their skills and tools. Out of the tension between these two domains, they create works of art that are original and meaningful.
The secret of living with creativity and imagination is to apply the creative process that artists use in their creations, to create the results we most want in our lives. By consistently applying the creative process, we begin to see a body of work emerge over time. Work that expresses who we are and what we care about. Work that is our original contribution to the world.
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LifeScaping: a ten step creative process
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Practices to Develop Creativity and Imagination
from The Everyday Work of Art by Eric Booth.
Develop and sustain an amateur artistic practice:
- Sing, play an instrument
- Sketch, paint, sculpt
- Dance
- Write prose or poetry
- Act
Pay attention to the base metaphors in your life:
- Is the world your oyster, or a dark scary place? Is work a necessary evil or a piece of cake? Is your marriage a desert, or perhaps an oasis?
Make it a daily habit to exercise your creativity in little ways:
- Create an original image or metaphor, even if it’s in casual conversation
- Tell a joke, make a pun, or point out the absurdity of a situation
- Grab a pen and paper napkin to sketch out an idea you have
- Sketch a garden plan, or a flower, or a child’s hand, or directions to your house from a particularly unusual starting place
- Try to find an image or description of a religious or mystical experience you’ve had
- Love holidays and fully celebrate them
- Write a thoughtful sympathy letter
- Make a special gift for someone
- Seriously answer a child’s serious question
- Construct a lie for a particular occasion
- Make a prepared speech
- Notice a recurrent pattern in your daily life
- Construct an elaborate sexual fantasy
- Think about the significance of a coincidence
- Notice you have been humming the same tune all day and begin to think about what that means
- Make a choice based on your aesthetic sense
- Keep a journal
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A Few Good Books
Booth, Eric. The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Inc., 1999
Fritz, Robert. The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1984
May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975
Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Zander, Benjamin, The Art of Possibility. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000
*all definitions from Oxford Paperback Dictionary, Thesaurus. Oxford, 2001
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