It’s Christmas. I just had dinner with my family and got some writing cubes as a gift. Time for some rest until school starts up again.
Before I got home, I had 5 days to finish writing a sermon, give a presentation, do prep research to write 2 exegetical papers, and finish as many illustrations as I could. It was a lot. But despite all this work, or maybe because of it, I deliberately took time to be creative. For example, I tried to find ways to make my study work creatively interesting. I spent a few hours to work on a painting. And, I wrote a little story draft for “Operation Easter Island”. Not to prove to myself that I can be creative under stress. Not to escape from “reality”. But to engage with “reality” and live in it. Yes, art helps me relax from school work. But it isn’t separate from the rest of life for me. It is part of life.

Maybe you are stressed or depressed or feel anxious, right now. Maybe you feel just fine. In any case, I would encourage you to find creativity in your daily life. Not as an “extra” point on your to-do-list. Not to make an otherwise bad life “tolerable”. But as an attitude to freshen up all of life. I just read an article about burnout, and the point of it was: you can’t just prevent burnout with “time off”-activities. You need to incorporate good structures into all of life. Creative times can be part of that, not separate from it. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it means to me that I want creativity to be part of school work, downtime, friend time, and everything else. You can see the outcome for me (painting in progress, one of the illustrations, the story premise) down below. If you have something to share, leave a comment with your own creativity. And in any case, have a great day.

Operation Easter Island – Premise: Mrs. Morris is going away for the weekend and lets Molly babysit her cat Easter. Molly has always wanted to have a job like this, so she is really excited. But babysitting is harder than expected. And when Easter runs off, Molly will need the help of her best friend Jenna, a plush narwhal named Reginald, and a broken teacup to get Easter back.