If you feel anxious, nervous, or tense a lot of the time, this is for you. It’s for me, too.
I feel tense. Incredibly so. A great deal of the time. I’m restless. Pulled in a multitude of directions all at once. I want to paint the town red, but I also want to pull the covers over my head and stay there all week.
I’m functional, though. Just about. And I’m sociable. So I put on a brave face. And yet in any given moment, the chances are that I don’t feel I’m doing the right thing.
There’s just one exception: when I’m creating.
When I’m creating, all that bullshit goes way.
I don’t mean “creating” as in “the creative arts.” No. I’m talking FAR more broadly than that. I mean “creating” as in “doing something to move the world in a slightly more positive direction.” And when you define it that way, almost anything can be creative.
Call me crazy, but I believe that the feeling of tension – a chronic existential anxiety – is a good thing. When we feel tense, it’s because – in the moment of tension – we are not doing what we are meant to be doing. We are not creating. And whoever’s in charge is letting us know. Thank you.
Every single moment of every single day, we are given the opportunity to make the world slightly more beautiful, or slightly more ugly. There is no neutral – you can’t get out of this by standing still.
When you feel tense and you face it head-on – by creating – you are rewarded. You feel a wonderful sense of expansion and oneness. You want to go do more stuff like that.
But when you run from the tension – by pulling out your phone, by watching a series you’ve seen before, by drinking a bottle of rum – you get no real reward, just neuorogically empty calories. The tension pretends to have gone away, only to come back worse tomorrow.
I don’t know what you should be doing. All I know is that creating is the only thing I have ever found that actually cures me of my chronic tension. And again… ANYTHING CAN BE CREATIVE.
When in doubt, create.