Creating With New Eyes

One of the things I love best about travel is that I receive new eyes. Years ago I had a transformative experience when my wife and I visited friends in South America. It was a lovely trip but we experienced their normal life. No touring, no incredible landmarks or world destinations. Just everyday things…good coffee, good conversation, lush vegetation, and color everywhere. It was as if I had been living in a daguerreotype world until that point and it changed to Kodachrome, as if living in Kansas and arriving in Oz. I was able to bring that back home with me and life had a different meaning. The mundane was elevated, the ordinary made extraordinary.

Of course in time, life has a way of diminishing its colors, of fading so that days only have meaning on calendars, hours as disposable as the grounds that brew cup after cup of ordinary coffee.

And then I go somewhere…anywhere. And I become as Bartimaeus in the New Testament, my sight is restored, I am reminded of the colors in this life and how important they are to this life. And I desperately try to bring those colors back home with me and hold on to them until I begin to lose track of the days once again.

That is what this trip to Paris has done for me. Again. I have seen some wonderful things, but none as lovely as the sunsets. I have marveled at legendary creations but none as beautiful as smiles and laughter of friends and strangers. I have sipped magical coffee and Chardonnay and relished each experience. Are they really that much better than home? Only because I am allowing myself to experience them in a way that I do not at home.

What is the creative point here?

As creatives we need to feed and nurture our creative souls. To the utmost extent that we can, we need to keep our hearts from being stripped and numbed. We need to fervently fight to keep our routines from becoming…well…routine. We need refreshment, we need reminders, we need experiences to jostle us from the mundane, to remind us that we are not just biding time until there is no more time. We need the colors restored sometimes to create our art. And sometimes we need to create our art to restore our colors. The exotic is not a matter of distance or destination. It is a matter of perspective.

This is a Monday morning, the most maligned of days, the most cliched of days. How can you make it different? How can you reclaim one-seventh of your life and make it special? Find the magical in the every day. And just like the recurring days of the week, you will find the magic in the common words as you put them to the page. Not because you have to. Not because you’re trying to please anyone else. But because they are special and the reason they are special is because they are your words, written from your passion, from your heart.

The sun is out here and there are lovely reflections off of the windows across the way, windows with smudges and fingerprints and imperfections. But the colors of the light…oh the colors are lovely.

Find your words and put them down. They’re your words.

I think I smell a good coffee waiting for me somewhere….