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Life is getting busier; technology is advancing faster. How might we benefit from stepping out of the maelstrom to enjoy a few moments of creative relaxation?

Time for herself

A hot afternoon in July, a young woman walked into Mediterraneo, one of several Italians off Portobello, and ordered a Diet Coke. Waving in the direction of the street, the manager said she was welcome to any outside table.

The woman emptied her glass, settled into the shade, and took a pencil from her bag. The sketch she made likely showed the wheat-coloured church on the corner, a restaurant front or two, and perhaps tourists searching for Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill bookshop.

After two hours, the woman slipped the sketchbook into a tote bag, rose from the table, and walked with purpose up the street. This moment of creative solitude was undisturbed by the local hubbub; it also seemed shielded from whatever came before or after her time there.

Our own busyness

In our world of smartphones and pings, newsreels and clicks, updates and ads, we all need more moments like this, don’t we, away from the busyness of it all?

At work, we have little time for ‘strategic thinking’. We fight fires and rush around to solve the issues that grab our attention today. Chasing our tails, we often spend effort on problems of other people’s making.

At home, we are bogged down with ‘life admin’. Our phones often dictate how we spend our hours of leisure and, before we know it, night falls: we had hardly a moment to ourselves.

I can only guess what the young woman was doing. But I like to think she was enjoying her own thoughts and emotions, savouring the world around her, and discovering ways to express herself through uniquely human creativity.

Everyday creativity

As technology burrows deeper into our lives, as lines between work and play are erased, as our culture of purpose, productivity, and performance exacts its toll of strain, we each may do well to invest in something other than being busy.

In recent months, both in my work with teams and in conversation with friends, I’ve thought about ways to shelter, however briefly, from the activity and strain of modern life. Being ‘creative’ comes up in many of these exchanges.

Creative expression in all its forms

People yearn to be creative, yet this does not mean being an artist, or even accomplished. Everyday creativity is about our informal, amateur efforts to express ourselves. (The word has its roots in the Latin ‘amare’, to love.)

It is also true that reading a novel, watching a film, wandering around a museum, or tending to a garden are acts of creativity. So is knitting a sweater, baking a cake, or furnishing a room.

Our culture encourages us to fret over the outputs, to worry whether what we produce is ‘good’. But what matters first is the creative act, the chance to express what is inside us. This is creativity for the self, a means to make more of who we are, away from the imperatives of a frenetic world.

Paradoxically, this kind of relaxation also gives us the energy, and mental and emotional resources, to make more of our ‘productive’ hours when we are at work or at home. For those of us in thrall to our to-do lists, everyday creativity helps us get things done, too.