The creative life

A friend of mine crafts weekly posts she calls Writerly Ways. She often begins them with real life situations that circumvent her writing efforts and she ends them with nuggets of wisdom (links) on story crafting, publishing, editing, blogging, etc.

I look forward to these because they inspire me. She’s facing setbacks but keeps going. Not only that, she offers a helping hand to others.

One of the links she shared this month was an article by Grant Faulkner: Fortify your New Year’s resolutions.

Faulkner writes, “Step into any preschool and observe the unbridled creative energy of kids as they immerse themselves in fingerpainting, telling wild stories, banging on drums, and dancing just to dance. They’re creative types because they breathe.”

We lose that as we get older. We let things sidetrack that creativity. Maybe that’s why resolutions are so popular.

January ends at midnight tonight. Rather than focus on what I didn’t check off on my to-do list this month, I’ll celebrate what I did. Despite all the problems, the ups and the downs, I breathed, I thought, and I wrote.

That makes my life just a little richer, though it may never put a penny in my pockets.