The hardest part of creativity

I think the hardest part about creating anything is not trusting yourself to come up with something good. It doesn't seem to matter how many things you put out, and how much you improve, you always have this nagging doubt that the thing you are currently working on will turn out trash and you have no idea what you are doing. Having the best ideas often seems to be a magical occurrence, largely outwith your control, and that is extremely frustrating.

The natural reaction to this, for most people, is to try to nail down what makes you most creative and then try to re-create that situation or circumstances. The problem with this is that we forget that our mind is working in the background, churning away on ideas. It's doing its best work when we aren't having anything to do with it. In some sense that is the true genius, the real artist in all our creative work. It's also the part of the equation that doesn't sit well with creative people because they like to see themselves as the artist, they are the creator, not some part of their brain buried deep in the background. Why do we think of our 'self' as only our conscious brain? Why do we disassociate that ancient part of our brain from our sense of self when it is clearly so important in how we view the world and what we put out into the world as our creative message?

On the human experience

So I've been thinking lately about being a human and how we experience things. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the problems people have in life come down to viewing life as something we have, rather than something we experience. Each of us feels like the life we have is our possession or right and that we actually own it and control it. When things go wrong we find the situation really difficult to marry up with that feeling of ownership because we are coming from the perspective that we possess our life and control it. Maybe a better way to deal with life is to think about the idea that we are actually experiencing it, almost as an observer. Life is happening and we are taking part in it but it's not so much that we own our lives. This lets us have less expectations on life and consequently get less bent out of shape about small things that come up or even big things that would normally take up all of our thinking. The situation may be bad, but maybe we should just think about what we can do to enjoy our current experience, rather than stressing out about the fact that life is, mainly, just not in line with what we expected.

I've personally been finding this quite useful in dealing with some medical issues I've been having recently. I'm still nervous about things and I still worry to an extent but I'm worrying less because I've tried to remember the perspective that my body is not something I have complete control over. Sure I can change some things about it through exercise and diet etc but It's not really 'my' body so to speak but the body that i'm experiencing life through. Things about it will fail over time and I have to accept that fact. This helps me to stop worrying about every little ache or problem and wondering whether they could be part of the medical issues i'm going through. They are just part of having a body. I know it sounds completely crazy but nothing takes pain away like understanding that it's not a problem or that it's under control.

It's quite a subtle shift in thinking but i'm finding it quite powerful. 

Words have power because you can't ignore them

One of the most difficult things in life can be learning when/how to ignore other people and blocking out things they say or the effect they have on you. It is a sad fact that in most conversations you have with people, that go beyond the very basic or mundane, the person you are conversing with will have some form of agenda that is not necessarily aligned with your own. These thoughts can, over time, get embedded under your brain and become difficult to shift. Like some clawing little beast inside your mind, you can't even remember why it is you suddenly feel the need to do something. It feels like a compulsion that you can't tie down until suddenly it hits you, this is because of that conversation you had with that weird guy in the uni lab isn't it. You remember, that one where he told you about his theory on life and how it's very fabric is affected by demon carrots and our zombie rabbit masters.

You see this is the danger of cognition and language. We hear, parse and understand language but we don't have some underlying system for processing it without it entering our brain first. It's not like the autonomous parts of the central nervous system, it has to actually fire neurons in our grey matter and get swirled around and reinforce the pathways that the thought takes. This means that simply by listening to an idea, even if it's complete garbage, we still run the risk of internalising it. This is the principle behind a lawyer blurting out something in a courtroom that is then stricken from the record. It was still heard and it will still influence the jury, whether they want it to or not.

This concept grows arms and legs when you consider that some people have things they want you to hear, even if they have no idea whether it's the best thing for you or whether the concept could cause you damage or get you in trouble. Words are a powerful thing and we would do well to not use them with complete abandon, as we most often do.

Name change!

So recently I decided to start using DistroKid to get my music out there into the bigger, wider world. It's a great service that will let you upload as many releases as you do in a year for a flat rate fee per year. It uploades to all the usual suspects, iTunes, Spotify etc. Seems great right? Well it is until you discover that your stage name "Pipo" is shared with a French Salsa musician who has a larger fanbase than you and thus dwarfs all your releases. Not so good! With that in mind, and to avoid any potential legal matters, I have decided to re-brand. My new name will be "Pipo Animatronic". This should be easy for people to find, has a nice ring to it and fits well how I feel about myself a lot of the time. I often feel like i'm more of an imitation human, trying to understand the world around me, while getting it wrong a lot of that time, and that fits well the image of an animatronic puppet.