A creative purpose acts as a guide, helping you feel like you are creating towards something that fills your heart and sense of self through self expression. It’s the drive behind what you feel you are meant to do or create in life.
The anxious creative tension that helps fuel a creative purpose, combined with the inner drive to make something with meaning, opens up possibilities coupled with expectations – and it can sometimes feel heavy. Intense, prolonged focus on one goal or idea can also pile on the pressure to make every action and thought connect directly to your creative purpose in order for it to be meaningful.
While moments in life are important (and non-refundable), forceful planning on your part to always work toward a specific purpose can accidentally wrangle you into a rut. Soon your room to play and explore feels limited, the playground rather confining.
For driven people it can be a challenge to let creative purpose take a back seat once and a while and just “be”, to allow ideas to wash over you and play without having to tie them to an “action plan”. That’s why stepping back helps open you up from a fine point of focus to the whole expanse of the horizon.
Creative Purpose and Play for the Entrepreneur at Heart
This is an exciting time where more people than ever are carving their own way, breaking with traditional paths and finding different or more non-traditional methods to combine meaning in life and work. Blazing new connections takes a lot of energy and passion, so every now and again it’s fun to find new ways to refuel your creative purpose with fresh life and intention by simply giving it a much-deserved rest.
There is a sense of guilt that sets in at times when you work for yourself because you know and feel you are the only one who is focused on propelling your creative purpose forward, but there is strength in breaks. There is power in wandering off path and ditching your creative purpose for a while so you can free up the laser focus, finding a way to refresh your eyes and heart.
What Does Play Look Like to You?
While moving into my new home recently I came across a few old water color pictures I painted 10 years ago. They aren’t “museum worthy” nor would they mean anything to anyone else, but it was so fun to find them, to see my mind and heart squiggle in a different medium making pathways outside of words. I haven’t painted any new ones in ages.
A change of pace and space through this (at times hectic) move has offered me a new way to wake up old playful tendencies or find new ones. Writing in new space also gives me a chance to experiment with different rhythms and ways to connect with the words that want to dance onto the screen in dribs and drabs.
For you, play might be sewing, cooking, playing with your children, reading a great book, watching a sunset. Keep in mind, taking a break from a creative purpose is not the same as zoning out; it’s a way to spend your time differently that leads to no specific, pre-determined results, but allows you to be present, feeling and enjoying the moment without forcing it into a creative purpose stepping stone.
I think it’s fun to open up new avenues to enhance my creative purpose instead of always keeping it laser focused right on top of “what it all means.” This week I invite you to do the same. Pick something you know will do nothing more than fill your heart and do it just because you feel like it. Clarity will come when it’s meant to, not because you spent every single moment pushing for it to appear like a mirage in the desert.
So are you willing to give your creative purpose a breather?
Heart photo: ldfranklin