270: Brave Creative Humans: Colouring outside the lines
- Diana Varma
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
I invite you to close your eyes.
Imagine yourself as a kid, a fresh box of crayons in one hand and a colouring book in the other. You choose your favourite colour, carefully removing it from the box and start to make marks on the page. A scribble here, a scribble there. It feels good to add colour where there wasn’t any before.
As our younger selves, it was less about the final product and more about the process; the excitement of a world unfolding before our eyes.
As you grew older, there was likely more emphasis was placed on refinement, polish, and skill development. Learning to use new tools, learning to shade, learning to colour inside the lines. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with growth and creative trajectory (both wonderful things!), too often the final product is prioritized over the value to be found in the process.
In other words, while colouring inside the lines may look better to the outside world, often colouring outside the lines feels better to us on the inside.
Not everything we make or do needs to be intentional or look polished. In fact, often our most interesting creative work can be brought forth when we give ourselves the permission to let the process guide us, not needing to conform to what’s expected, feeling free to have our work spill over the real or imagined boundaries of our identity and positionality in the world.
In this fifth episode, I asked our brave creative humans “How do you ‘colour outside of the lines’ in your creative work; in other words, how are you living a creative existence on your own terms?”
Let’s listen in…
Whether making time for play, asking “why” more often, letting go of the need for approval, trying things we didn’t necessarily “go to school for”, collaborating within community, or becoming comfortable being creatively uncomfortable, there are many ways to colour outside the lines, brave creative human.
Next time, in the final episode, Allison, Kevin, Vincent, Meg, Emad, and Justine Abigail share their thoughts on what living a brave creative human existence ultimately means to them.
Stay tuned…
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Music:
Just Havin’ a Beatbox - John Bartmann licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal License
Talk Paper Scissors Theme Music: Retro Quirky Upbeat Funk by Lewis Sound Production via Audio Jungle
