Habits, Happiness | Books Around The Table
Habits are powerful things!
I have some good habits. I have the habit of riding my bicycle. My default vehicle for any errand or outing is my bike unless circumstances demand otherwise.
I have some bad habits. I have a sweet tooth. I nibble or gobble dark chocolate every day. The advantage and disadvantage of a habit is not thinking too much about what you are doing.
Habits can dwindle or break. For a while I lost the habit of reading but happily I have come back to books.
And I have the habit of making art.
It is counterintuitive that habit allows for inspiration, but I find it to be true. Just showing up allows ideas to come. You can’t do anything unless you start, and it is easier to keep going than to start. Habit is a way of keeping going.
Another counterintuitive idea is that a bit of not-caring can result in something worth caring about. Good ideas can grow out of bad ideas. Lowering the stakes is a way of silencing my inner critic and allowing myself to play.
Right now the NY Times is having a creativity challenge. Every day they give a prompt to spur your creativity. Many of those prompts create a situation where the stakes are low but there are also parameters.
My own low-stakes creativity habit is drawing coloring pages for my website. I have been posting them on my website since the pandemic lockdown. There is now an archive of 678 old images to choose from as well as new ones each week. All of the images (including those illustrating this post) are available here.
I don’t have to think about whether I will draw coloring pages. I just draw them. Some give me new ideas, others are just old friends/themes.
Some of the drawings soar and some are pretty bad.
Good or bad I keep going. Maybe the next fish will be better.
The habit of drawing loosely allows me to create ideas that can be filled in or developed later.
If you want to inject creativity in your life I recommend forming a mundane habit such as drawing, writing or singing for a few minutes a day. Then if a lightning bolt of inspiration happens to strike, you are ready to put it in a bottle.
