Being Overwhelmed Is Necessary For Creativity
I find I am often overwhelmed. I just organized my six boxes of books and found that I had never touched the books in about two boxes. There’s too many. Which do I choose?
I feel the same way about ideas. Somedays I am spurned with five or ten or fifteen ideas for an article or story. I am like a compass blowing on a windy day, spinning in all directions simultaneously. I feel completely out of my element. But then, after a while, I realize it’s a good thing.
A single path is only made meaningful by the presence of other options. A choice only matters when there are other paths to choose from. And beneath all choices and all paths is a great deep blue ocean of pure creation.
In the Yin and Yang, it is the Yin. The chaos before time. The flood that consumed the earth only to give birth to it again. It is unsteady, unstable, and utterly endless. It is the positive aspect of the void.
Like a choice, a creation is only made possible by the presence of the pieces that could be used to create it. The dense, unkempt forest must precede the beautiful log cabin built from wood cut to a razor’s edge and sanded to the smoothness of skin.
Creativity is not possible without this overwhelming chaos that we can always tap into. Like the sexual energy that fills a man with an internal sense of combustion, so too must the ocean of endless possibility underlay every reality that emerges from the infinite.
We can only create when we tap into that endless sea. It is the precondition for creation. Overwhelming-ness creates the conditions for mastery and control, where we eventually become the master of the sea, able to direct and guide her path.
I have begun to embrace the presence of overwhelmingness as a sign that I am indeed on the right path and in the right place — for what better place to be than at the source of creation?
When I want to read fifteen books at once I know that I am in the right place, because the only alternative to this is apathy. The middle ground, where we can put all our focus into one book, one idea, one project, and one moment at a time is learned through harnessing the infinite overwhelmingness.
It is learned through taking the ocean of fire that beats in our chest and creating a path for it to flow, controlled, and to let it light a fire to the one thing we are engaged in. Fire is the pathmaker from the great ocean of choice just as a craftsman is to the raw elements of creation.
Did Prometheus give us fire to burn the world down? Or, did he give us fire to burn through the controlled canals of our veins and arteries, setting our beings afire to forge a path forward, one step at a time?
No wonder you have the energy to burn down the entire world. It is the only way we can choose to do anything at any time at all. You can only meaningfully burn one path when the choice to burn all paths is present within you. Let your fire breathe. What path will you choose?
