On trying to be creative.
When I was a young sprat of a child, I managed to persuade my cash-strapped parents that I needed to take piano lessons and for the next 10-12 years I diligently practiced and was able to knock out a tune of sorts. I hated the practice. I wanted to be able to play without having to go through all the endurance that needed to be done to get there.
At fifteen I realised that I couldn’t study for my school exams and do the practice I needed at the same time – something had to go … and that was the piano. I never came back to it.
Writing is pretty much the same for me. I would have loved to have been a great writer, noticing people reading my books on trains or in cafes. Going around the country, hell around the world even, doing book signings and speaking to my fans. Trouble is I didn’t want the hassle of putting pen to paper. The other hassle was that I doubt I’ve ever had an original idea.
Now I’m nearly seventy and getting close to the packing day for this lifetime. I am writing. I am putting pen to paper (well clicking on the keyboard) and churning out what passes for a blog.
Keeping going ...
I am aware that there are over 600 million blogs in the world right now and approximately (as it is more difficult to define niches) at least a million of them are travel blogs, so the thought is ‘why bother?’ Most bloggers are destined to be the Salieri to Mozart.
So why do I keep going? Because it’s difficult to stop? I’ve been writing this blog for around seven years now, nearly as long as I’ve been travelling full-time. I have had my rest periods – when I thought I’ll stop and give myself a gentle break, to refresh and get new inspiration … but now I’m aware that persistence is key. Doing it gives me the momentum to carry on.
Another factor may be anchored in that childhood dream of being a great musician. Part of the reason I never returned to making music was that I started pressing other buttons – the ones on fruit machines. I was around 16 when I started earning my own money for the first time and around 17 when I started to waste it. Perhaps pressing the buttons on this keyboard is a way of atoning for the damage I did as I tried to make sense of the world I was growing up in.
Painkillers?
I’ve written elsewhere of how, for me, gambling was a way of escaping from the pain of living, certainly the pain I was feeling at that time and not taking responsibility for the ending of that pain. You can read more in this post from 2020 – click here.
Now, as we move through the second quarter of the twenty-first century, the pain is not so much personal as existential. Watching the hate and bile that people, who should know better, are throwing at each other in the UK. Seeing children being blown to bits in the Middle East and feeling helpless to do anything about it. I guess it would be easy to blot that pain out again … if not by gambling then by some other addiction, alcohol or drugs. Travelling allows me to see the current political arguments from a distance and from another perspective. Being in a country as welcoming to other customs and cultures as Malaysia is, shows me that the divisions in other parts of the world needn’t be that way.
A different conclusion?
Perhaps the question is not ‘how to be creative when I don’t feel like it’. It’s why continue at all — and the answer seems to be that in making something, however small, I can leave a trace of myself in a messed-up world that is beyond my influence.
It’s interesting that I have never found travelling an endurance. Okay there have been occasions like a three-hour flight delay when I have wondered, ‘what the hell am I doing this for?’ but that has been the exception. In travel my life flows. In writing, not so much – but even that is better than my memory of chromatic scales.
I see travelling not as an escape from the pain of living but more as an engagement with it, and perhaps writing is my way of making sense of what I find. If that is the case then maybe it’s not that I want to be creative – it’s that I need to be creative to make sense of my life. Maybe I’m not yet at the packing stage of my journey on earth, but in the prior clutter clearing phase. Filing away the things that are meaningful, maybe passing them on to future generations and getting rid of the thoughts and feelings that are no longer useful. Antonio Salieri wrote some great music, and like him, I need to remain true to my own voice.
