Engage

Have you ever wondered how creativity works? Consider why we feel so alive and connected when struck by the imperative to do. What I like to call playing the verb card. Laying down an action. Doing. Running, riding an indoor bicycle (the alleged theme of this blog), counting laps in the pool, hiking to the highest point in your county, drawing with crayons, authoring a few lines of iambic pentameter, taking a photo trek, editing video, walking the dogs on the beach, in other words, tapping into your creative imperative. Getting into the magical flow of creating something out of nothing.

It is very God-like. That miraculous condition labeled kamiwazza by the Japanese.

The wonderful thing about this kamiwazza concept is that anyone can do it. We are not talking solely about the masters, the Michaelangelos, Mozarts or Miltons, we are talking about you. The collective you. ALL of you. Us.

As so often occurs amid this current chaos and confusion, all cleverly orchestrated by a cabal of predatory capitalists, we are pointed in exactly the opposite direction. The direction of the big-box stores where our immediate gratifications and time-filling, brain-numbing entertainments are found. It is so easy to drop a grand on the latest iPhone and spend the day watching other people do things. Much easier it seems than doing those things ourselves. I could cite today as the quintessential example of this mass-market money scheme, being it Super Bowl whatever Sunday, but I will resist taking the easy way out. You get it.

Life is meant to be a participatory adventure, not a spectator sport. I support the idea that it is about doing, not watching. About creating something, including the synergy of our minds, bodies and spirits towards the creation of something that might inspire others to take up the same holy cause. THAT is a masterpiece. One person's capolavoro.

Go inside, stay still and count your breaths. Listen to the muted message of the muse. Something will emerge. You will see, hear, feel, taste, intuit, wonder, or sense that a code needs breaking, that a song needs to be sung or a story recounted. You can practice this like any other skill.

Once you begin, nothing will ever be the same for you will have tapped into the essence of life. It is about doing. About creating and about change. Once you are here, there is but a single choice, you must:

Engage.

Photo credit. From the author's scrapbook, Italy, 1993, Me & Dave.