Creativity & Aging: How Sex and Drawing are the Same

"We're not making pretty perfect pictures. We're making a record of what we see." -- Danny Gregory

Every child in kindergarten is an artist. With open abandon and eagerly, they will paint and draw and sculpt with clay. With the slightest encouragement, they will collect macaroni to adorn handmade boxes, clip pictures from a magazine, paste and glue and create collages. They will sing and not worry if they are out of tune; they will dance without knowing the steps; they will play drums and tambourine without feeling inadequate in musical talent. Children are naturally able to be in the moment and express what they see and feel from fresh original perspectives.

For children, every day is new, and every thing in the day is new. There is no place or time within for self-editing before, during, or after the creative process. All art is good art simply because it is art. It is truly the journey and not the destination children intuitively understand above all else. The crusty inflexible inner critic won't appear for another five or six years.

By adulthood, most of the free-willed kindergarten artists have long forgotten the simple delight and joy in the Zen-like presence of creative being and being creative. Welcome the high-volume chairman of adult inner voices -- the Curmudgeon of You Can't Do That.

As the years unfold before us, we adeptly learn how to be someone else, other than the distinctively unique self we were before it mattered what anyone else thought. Firmly entrenched in adulthood, nothing much about our daily life feels new anymore.

In midlife, it took a life crisis and the intimate introduction to my own mortality to stop the direction of my life long enough to question where I had been and where I was headed, what held meaning and what seemed shallow. Had I been true to my uniquely authentic creative self? Had I allowed my creativity to nourish, define, and give shape to my life? Had I been using creativity to understand the simplest pleasures and deeper meanings of life? If not, as I was to realize upon reflection of the questions, could creativity help me sort things out to understanding and finding my way now?

Everything I already knew about creative being and being creative and creativity, of being in the moment and living a life of truth and beauty but had forgotten in the busyness of my seriously-responsible and socially acceptable adult years, I remembered again when I read Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters and The Creative License Giving Yourself Permission To Be The Artist You Truly Are.

A seasoned veteran of the advertising world, where words and images are tools of the trade, Gregory denied he was an artist until he could not deny his personal creativity one more day. He began a journal of drawings and thoughts as a means of expressing his creativity in order to sort things out, and find his way in everyday matters. He began to draw because he felt compelled to give himself permission to draw. He sketched the entire contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet, throw pillows and dinner on Wednesday. When he had drawn everything in his home, he went outside to draw more. On the back cover of Everyday Matters it reads: “Two years before I started drawing, my wife was run over by a subway train and nearly killed. Well, this book is about how art and New York City saved my life.”

Gregory is generously giving in the spirit of creativity, and The Creative License Giving Yourself Permission To Be The Artist You Truly Are is an inspirational how-to in drawing, creative being and being creative for anyone who would like to remember and renew their own creativity. Some of the ideas, information and inspiration include: Kick-starting your Creativity and Learning to See; Making Creativity Into a Habit; Who You Are and Why That's Fine; Broadening Your Creativity and Creativity in the Real World.

There is wisdom and wit within the vulnerable honesty of Gregory's illustrated journals, as he goes about the task of encouraging even the most hesitant by way of an analogy of how sex and drawing are the same:

How Sex and Drawing are the Same

• The first time is usually an embarrassing disaster. But it only improves.
• Slower is better.
• For the best results, you must let go.
• Abstinence is a sad business.
• Even when it’s not great, it’s pretty good.
• You can do it for hours. Or for a minute or two.
• Experimentation is usually fun, rarely painful.
• Better to fool around a little every day or two than to have an orgy once a year.
• If you suppress the urge in one place, it’ll pop up somewhere else. And you might not like where.
• You can take lessons, but you don’t need to.
• Some people get paid to do it. Most people do it when they don’t.
• It doesn’t matter what other people think of how you do it.

At any point in life, we might find ourselves in need of reinvention, redefinition, and renewal of the authentic creative self that thrives in truth and beauty. For boomers on the threshold of the third stage of life, contemplating how they will enter the beginning of a new stage of life and not the end of life -- a blank-paged journal and drawing pens might make a very good start.

Sources: The How Sex and Drawing are the Same list is reprinted with permission from author; Danny Gregory Everyday Matters blog; Everyday Matters; The Creative License