When you create, you are letting go of everything you know for a while. Instead of getting water from a tap, you go to the well. You throw the encyclopedia away. You visit the Palace from where all creativity comes.
When you are creative, instead of buying a mass-produced product at a department store, you go to the studio where all the colors are provided, where you can mix your own paint, take your own brush, and paint on the canvas with the colors from your own heart. Or perhaps you reproduce your heart in words, or you move around notes of music that lift the heart. When you are done, then you look at what you have made and you are stirred to say, as I was stirred to say at the moment of creation, “It is good.”
You can be creative in life. You can be an artist of your own life. You can see situations in a new light, and you can find ways to respond that never occurred to you before. If you have been someone who runs into controversy head on, or if you have been someone who dances around life and avoids it for all you are worth, whatever your practice has been, now you can meet life as you never did before. You can sidestep your own patterns. You can present yourself and all that you call holy in a new way. You can be creative in life. Think of it!
The way Christ made parables, you can make parables in your life. What are parables for but to help someone see in a new way?
When you come from a different angle, you allow someone else to as well. When you come from a new angle, you are looking at a situation in a new way. You put the factors together in a new way. You weave the threads of life differently. A new way of weaving creates a new design for the carpet of life.
If you are someone who has been prone to get upset, find another tune to sing, another pattern to weave on the loom. Instead of going from left to right, go right to left.
Perhaps you have repeated yourself enough, and it is incumbent upon you to find another way so other people can understand what you are trying to get across. New ways are found in life. Piano teachers no longer whack the knuckles of their student’s hand with a ruler when he mistakenly plays an unruly note.
Consider yourself a kind teacher in life, and everyone is here to learn something wonderful from you. Even when you are the student, you are a teacher to your teacher.
If you are an employer, you don’t have to yell any more. And if you are the employee yelled at, you can also listen and be a kind teacher to your employer.
And if you are a parent, you can be a creative one. And if you are the child, you can find another way to respond.
Of course, you wish it were that simple. The situations you find yourself in and the roles you play – they keep changing. That is your difficulty, and that is your solution, for you must change as well. It is for you to change your approach with what appears before you, especially when what appears before you keeps reappearing.
When you feel angry or frustrated with someone or something, consider what you can do now that you never thought of to do before in this situation or with this individual or group. The offending party doesn’t see something the way you do, and you don’t see something the way they do. Is that not the crux of difficulties you have?
When someone else is responsible to you, you have a responsibility. You may have the authority, but, if being authoritative didn’t work yesterday, what makes you think it will work today? Find another way, beloveds. Find another way. Be creative. Think of a creative way to turn the wheel that is called life.