Lower level living

It's been one of those days that has been a bit over-
whelming. It's easy to get out of the habit of a regular work day, especially when it's already the slow season for my industry. The fun stuff, like taking home made cookies to my business network, has come to an end for the season. It's time to lay the groundwork to hit 2007 running. It felt more like diving into the shallow end of a cold swimming pool, and I can still feel the impression of the telephone on my ear.

About midway through my day and after dealing with one of the biggest, rudest jerks I have ever had the misfortune of hearing on the other end of a telephone, I found myself drifting away. Okay, it was time for lunch. I felt entitled. Low blood sugar makes your attention drop. A quick reverie before nuking my low cal frozen sandwich wasn't too bad of an indulgence. It would make me more productive ... really. What I found myself wondering is where my creative life seems to have gone.

I thought about my recent blog entries. Most have had sloppy grammar, enough misspellings to make me wince, a rather vague and syrupy tone and general what I've done content. That stuff is for the offline journal. My readership may barely reach the charts, but I still want the content to be a good, engaging read. I haven't done any work on my ongoing long story, novella, novel -- whatever it turns out to be, in far too long. I haven't written any poems. Heck, other than the traditional consumption of A Christmas Carol, I haven't read any good books in too long. Not only have I not been exercising my creativity, I haven't fed it either. Not good. Not good at all.

I may have to be fairly driven, focused and anal retentive about details to do my job well, but in order to live well with some sense of personal fulfillment and mission, I have to give time and passion to writing creatively. That's when it hit me. I've been living on the bottom levels of Maslow's pyramid. Heck, I can't even think any deeper than Psychology 101. Those basic life needs take tremendous energy, and they are absolutely essential. If my crumbling memory serves me correctly, Maslow thought it was impossible to move to the next level of the pyramid until those needs were met. I know there's more though. I've experienced more, and I've learned enough to know that I have to push myself to go beyond basic survival.

My sense of belonging, my self-image and my self-esteem, and my sense of self- actualization, becoming who I'm meant to be are intricately and inseparably bound to using creativity in my life. It's time to reach for more. That J part of my INFJ personality and my left brain would love for life to be a linear progression up the pyramid. I would love to be able to always take the lower levels for granted because I was there once. It's just not that simple. My life is more like Chutes and Ladders. I go up and down with dismaying frequency, but when I relinquish trying to be creative, I stay down longer. I seem to have forgotten that for awhile, and I'm determined to get that back.

I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do like developing goals and strategies. Once again, writing well has to be a goal that I write down and keep in front of me. My left brain won't unleash the right unless it senses a sense of order and structure, so I have to please both parts of me. The right brain holds the dream, and the left brain figures out how to make it work in the chaos of my daily life. I got that lesson today, so those talkative phone hours and my little mental escape held some value. That's a good enough place to begin again.

creativity, Maslow