Lately I have felt overwhelmed by emails, text messages, ads, streaming, scrolling, and reading on a digital device. My fingers are forming calluses from holding my phone, e-reader, remote, and tablet. No joke! The inside of my pinky finger on my right hand is numb and callused. My eyes are tired of blue screens, white screens, and flashing images. I have a vision of developing short T-Rex arms from having them curled up to my face, device in hand, awash in artificial light.
Remember the simple and consuming joy of arts and crafts when in grade school? The feel of paper? The satisfying snap as you squeezed a hand-held hole punch, the click of the stapler, the smooth glide of a glue stick. Why did we forfeit those simple joys? Is it because we bought into the notion that all aspects of our lives must be productive with tasks that have the potential of financial return? What became of creativity simply for the sake of creativity?
Recently I began collecting old magazines from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. Buttons. Paper that I find interesting - both handmade and mass produced. Cards and trinkets. Some items are old and some modern. All simply because of the joy they bring to have and to hold. Textures and colors. I started collecting and then curating packets from which to make journals and cards. Each one unique and created by me.
Slowing down with paper, scissors, glue, and materials without any clear path or instructions, just my own creativity, has been a welcomed escape from text messages, emails, and YouTube videos of cats riding robot vacuums or guys wracking their sprouts on a handrail when the attempt to grind their skateboard goes horribly wrong.
It doesn’t matter if I use what I created, put it away in a drawer, give it away, or sell it. What matters is I slowed down and lived in the moment - not looking back and not looking ahead. Not lifelessly hunched over in a chair. Instead, selecting materials. Feeling the grain of the paper. The smell of old magazines. Admiring the artistry of ads from 50 to 80 years ago. Reading what mattered to people at that time. Selecting old buttons and other ephemera.
The Analog and intentional half hour, hour, or two becomes not only a calming practice, but results in something I created that is uniquely mine.
I hope to encourage you to find time to be creative again. It is OK to create for the sake of creating. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Give yourself permission to have fun and get your senses involved. Leather, wood, brass, paper, twine, vellum. The pages of an old book or magazine. Get lost in the process of making and find calm in the rhythm of crafting, or painting, or woodwork. Whatever it is.
