A Long Lost Letter From Your Innate Creative Self

Let yourself go. Shake off inhibition and fear, and be yourself. Learn to think and act naturally, spontaneously; harmony and symmetry will enter your life, and you will discover your inherent talent. Thus he discovers his talent. It may be in the arts, the sciences, business, war, or politics; but wherever he finds his niche, he will fit into it as a hand in a skintight glove, as if he and it were made for each other, and he will perform his work in such a manner as to be completely indistinguishable from it.

- Uell Stanley Andersen

You are created by two human beings making love through the beat of their bodies. For nine months you are a tiny organism feeding onto a chord that connects you to your mother’s womb. Then you pass through the tunnel that separates you from your mother’s body and into an unfamiliar world. Congratulations, you’ve already come a long way. Now you are human being on planet Earth. For several months or so your heart is literally as close to the Earth as it will ever be your entire life. You are nurtured by your mother through the bosoms that secrete love milk to sustain and nourish you. Then you learn how to walk on your own. Such great talent you have, being capable of walking on your own two feet! Then you are now able to communicate with your fellow beings with full phrases. What a genius you’ve become! You have an innate curiosity to explore this vast world around you, and all you do is imagine and create. It’s your natural state. When your eyes are closed you are able to see ethereal worlds that you would have never seen in a physical realm with your eyes wide open.

Then you learn how to launch your rocket ship off of your backyard to outer space. You embark on a four hour journey across mountains and hanging bridges as you fight off dragons and five-headed monsters on your way to find buried treasure in your sandbox, just in time for mom’s dinner. You wake up the next morning and turn into a mermaid and explore the deep oceans of your inflatable pool. By noon you’ll be fighting off villains in your room in order to save your baby sister.

Everything starts as an image or idea in your head then it is later on fired by creativity. Then you manufacture those same ideas and images and make it come to life through the beauty of self-expression. You can paint, invent, write, draw, and create anything. And it is always exquisite. Mom always praises you on how good you are. You’re proud because you created something. You went from being a fetus, to being a conscious human being with your feet planted on the ground and head as infinitely far as your imagination takes you.

Then you enter the education system. And your capabilities are hindered through tiny bubbles of a standardized exam enforced by a broken institution. Your teachers tell you that your work isn’t good enough. That doing creative work will get you nowhere in life. See, you were a painter.  You created incredible art. And you did it not for money, not to impress, nor to prove something. You did it because you are capable of doing it, you love doing it, and it’s well beyond your ability. Then all of a sudden you are forced to make a decision on your career without knowing much of who you are. They tell you to go to college. Pick a degree that will make as much money possible. Not anything creative though, there’s not a lot of money in being creative. They establish this notion that everything revolves around money and that you are not successful unless you are financially wealthy. They tell you that once you get that degree, you must have a high salary job. Once you do, you buy a suit. You work in a cubicle. You have all the wealth. More than enough to provide for your family. Nice cars, big house, expensive things. You have it all. You develop a safe and secure daily routine that you practice for decades until you retire when you’re 60. Your creative spirit is in a dormant state at this point. Your mind becomes so used to your monotonous way of living that it adapts and works through that routine as well. Then you retire. Then your heart is exhausted from beating for all the wrong reasons. And one day you drive by the art store to re-paint your living room in attempts to salvage whatever creativity it is that you have left within your depleted soul. You pass by the aisle of brushes, oils, and acrylics. Your hand touches the tip of those brushes, and you think to yourself “What would I have been able to create if I just followed the tip of this paintbrush?”. And you’ll look back at the life that you lived and think to yourself “Did I live a full life? Did I even live up to my full potential? Did I become the person that I wanted to be?”. Then you hear a voice.

Come back to wherever you are in this present moment.

Hello again. It’s me. I was that creative spirit you lost many years ago. I want to tell you something. You are a very special living, breathing, bleeding, feeling, conscious being. You were born into this world to imagine, create, and explore. You have this innate childlike curiosity to learn and understand everything around you. To wander through your surroundings and revel in the beauty of seeing things for the first time.

Childhood was when you were the most ambitious and your dreams were the biggest. This was the most raw, unfiltered, expressive, liberating time of your life because this was when the borderline of impossible and possible was nonexistent. One thing you should know is, you can bring it back to life.

You created to manifest the vast realm of your imagination. May it be stick figures, chicken scratch, doodles, boy it was something. Everything starts off as an idea in your head. EVERYTHING. You can pinpoint whatever it is you want to do, pursue it with all of your heart and soul, harness all of your energy towards it and continue working towards it everyday and you will be talented at it. You will that use that creative medium to release the imaginative flow. Those stick figures became Van Gogh’s subjects. The finger paints became Salvador Dali’s art. The chicken scratch became Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings.

You want to learn how to draw? Take a class and do it. Want to play the guitar? Teach yourself, the internet is the most powerful learning tool ever invented, use it wisely. Want to become a painter? Go to the nearest art store and buy a handful of brushes, paint and start creating. And keep in mind that creativity is not solely processed through art. You can use it through science, business, anything at all as long as you put your heart and soul into it. If you apply the creative spirit to everything you do in life, it will give everything that you touch genuine meaning. It will radiate through your work, yourself, and your surroundings. And whatever it is you decide to do.. practice. EVERYDAY. The only thing that is holding you back from exploring all the abilities that you innately possess, is yourself.

The sad truth is we live in a society wherein they define and measure your value as a human being through the number of digits you have in your bank account. Where creativity and imagination has been suppressed and weighed down by a monetary system and a monotonous life path. As a result people live meaningless unhappy lives because they base their values of success and happiness through numbers. The mundane routines of life interrupts them from feeling the capacity of what human beings are able to feel.

You need to break out of that bubble. Take off the gray veil that has blinded you from experiencing the world around you in the most profound way. Explore your abilities and if you persist, one day you will find what you’re good at, you will find what you love to do. And once you do, you will never stop creating through it. It will be your soul’s purpose. There is a force that lies within creativity that is similar to birds building their nests, the effortless way that the flower grows from the soil, the intricate design of a seashell, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, and the formation of cotton candy clouds on a blue sky. There’s a natural impetus flowing through you that is inevitable and cannot be hindered so as long as you are working through your inner spirit.

Recognize the immensity of your existence on this planet. And whatever you want to do, never tell yourself that you can’t do it. Don’t even tell yourself that you are not the creative type. Don’t tell yourself that you have no talents and stop using it as an excuse as to why you haven’t explore your abilities. Stop telling yourself that it’s too difficult to attain. Stop telling yourself that you are inadequate. That’s nothing but an illusion. An illusion create by your ego-based mind hindering you from becoming the person you want to become, the person who you are truly meant to be.

Do this for yourself. For a moment, just picture your tiny and fragile self in your mother’s womb. Then look at yourself in the mirror, right before you is solid proof of how far you’ve come since then. You may not always be where you want to be, but you’re somewhere. It’s where you choose to go from there where your true potential lies.

YOU ARE HUMAN. There are worlds of talents and abilities that lie within you but you’ll never discover it until you dig it out. So start digging. It might be just waiting for you, right below the surface.