Expectation
I met an aspiring poet yesterday. Her name is Emily.
It’s not often that you get to witness someone’s dreams oozing out over just an hour’s lunch, but there it was in full view for anyone willing to observe and inquire about.
Emily is a college student/waitress who travels with pastel pencils, pens and a note book. She’s artistic but calls herself a poet/writer. She wears the uniform of the budding artist but she doesn’t know it’s a uniform yet.
These folks are easy to spot and easy to dismiss, but you do so at the expense of your own enrichment.
Ask anyone about their hopes, aspirations and dreams and you will make a new friend. More importantly, you help keep the conduit open between them and their creative self. Be careful though, some of that oozing passion just may awaken some of that desire that you’ve hidden away causing you to dream again.
Emily is discovering her creativity and is not sure how to apply it yet. That doesn’t make her any different than most people of her age. In fact, it doesn’t make her any different than people of any age. The difficulty I see, at one point, is burying your creative self with expectations that impede its progress.
These expectations serve as steel walls that creativity cannot fully scale. The sheer force of creativity will allow some of it to permeate these walls – enough to let us know that something more powerful than our expectations is present.
Expectation leads to self doubt which leads to atrophy which leads to lethargy. This progression contains a lot of starts and stops until we just shut down.
The self doubt that is felt is a result of the condemnation of not reaching expectations. It all boils down to this: “I am not enough.”
Depending on which “I” you are talking about, that can be a pretty accurate statement. The “I” that expectation comes from is never enough. It’s a self imposed pressure to measure up to an airbrushed ideal. It’s tough to compete with an enhanced expectation.
The way to give expectation the heave-ho and let creativity in is to just stop acting.
Even the greatest actors of our time cannot recreate the realness of an episode of “Cops.”
Acting out our expectation keeps creativity bottled up and bobbing with the secret message never getting read.
When you drop your act, you automatically let go of expectations and discover the eye of creativity. You begin to see things in a different light and your creations come out unexpectedly.
The expectation to be anybody other than who you are is self imposed. When you release the pressure of expectation, you unleash your creative self.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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