Are you trying more than you’re creating?
Do you need to know the end of something before you begin?
Let’s see...
Maybe you’re fine with going to a movie and sitting through to the end. Most people are.
Maybe you even watch the credits roll. I do.
Maybe you’re not a person who reads the last page of a novel before you read the first. I know people who do.
But how about in your life?
Do you need to know how your creative project or new business venture ends before you begin? Do you get stuck there sometimes?
Here’s your clue followed by a solution:
You’re planning a project. You’re all inspiration. You’re about to get started, maybe you’re even down the road. You start thinking about whether it will be successful. Maybe people won’t like it, maybe it won’t make money, maybe it will be a complete disaster.
Maybe, maybe, maybe!
Suddenly your need to know the end, mixed with some insecure thinking, propelled by your imagination has created a giant water balloon about to burst over your creativity, brilliant ideas or new business plans.
What’s happened? You’ve bumped up against your need to make the unknowable be knowable, like the end of that movie or that novel.
Ha! See? It is you after all!
But since you’re the Imagineer, and all that you experience is being created and projected from your own mind (remember no one’s even rejected you or “it” yet, and maybe never will) why would you use your power of imagination to scare yourself out of seeing your project all the way to the end?
Why wouldn’t you let yourself enjoy the highs and lows of the experience just like in a book or a movie? It might come out way better than you were thinking.
You can’t know!
Here’s a solution:
Consider not insisting on writing the last chapter before the first and the middle ones. Let them lead to each other. You need a beginning, and a middle. The end will take care of itself and maybe in a much more successful way than you even considered.
The point here is, you can’t know the unknowable. Stop trying, and living in a negative imaginary future. Start creating. Use your imagination for better more productive purposes. It’s a tool, so use it wisely.
Just sit down at that keyboard, that drawing table, or with pen in hand, and create in the present moment. It’s the only one you’ve got anyway.
Artwork: Blue cinema by Rene Magritte