Sometimes I worry about whether I’ll ever start even one more poem or essay when my time is filled with obligations like tax filing, keeping social commitments, paying bills, getting seeds planted in the garden on time, helping my daughter with babysitting, helping my mother with her paperwork and doctor appointments, and, of course, the list goes on, and I haven’t even mentioned work!

If you are like me, there are weeks when you feel so overburdened with responsibilities and musts that you worry you won’t ever find the spark that brings feelings of joy and freedom, that helps you realize the spirited person you are who can fly and stand on the ground at the same time. You worry that the spark you once felt has been extinguished forever, that you will be left without the ability to reconnect to the all and everything through creations born of your perceptions, questions and observations.

The happy news is that our creativity is an eternal light. It burns even when we are not paying attention to it. It doesn’t need relighting so much as our commitment to finding where it lights our path.

And on this path instead of defeat and ennui:

• you feel interested, interesting, and a part of something larger
• you feel energized even amidst responsibilities
• you feel enlivened from being able to express a higher self
• you feel not only a fraction of who you are but the whole of who you are

Recently, I came across a video online in which Korean writer Young-ha Kim shares his observations creativity. He talks about the play of children and the important lessons we find there. To begin with, children don’t wonder why they are playing. They just play. And, he says as part of this, children will make up stories just to justify what they blurt out.

Kim even posits that Kafka, who wrote what might be the best known opening sentence of any short story, did this in “Metamorphosis:”

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” 

“Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka’s work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature,” Kim says.

The take away for me? Kids use their imaginations to invent ways of understanding. As we age, we stifle our impulse to do this and start accepting and/or denying what is around us without encountering experience fully as we did as children. Our stance toward the world can become judgmental and grouchy and lack wonder and pleasure.

So, let’s stop worrying about where our creativity has gone and instead give ourselves the opportunity to create.

Kim reminds us that we don’t have to keep the artist in us a prisoner. We have multiple identities and don’t have to suffocate the artist just because we have to exercise the other identities for chunks of our time. We can be bankers and artists, he says, cab drivers and actors.

Kim asks his students to write about the most unfortunate incident of their childhood, in class for 30 to 40 minutes, where he can be sure they are “writing like crazy” so the “devil” who will fill them with reservations and make them stop writing can not catch up. This devil will ask what Kim calls the magic question to stop artists:

“You want to make art? What for?”

Hearing that question, so many of us will stop in our tracks with hundreds of reasons we can’t or shouldn’t make art. In writing, those should-not’s have to do with worrying about how others will judge what we find ourselves saying, how our families will take what we have to say. If we aren’t worried about what others say and feel and think, we are worried that our writing is not good enough to count, not good enough to spend our time on.

The right answer to the devil’s magic question, the answer that is a magic shield, is that art is not for anything but the fun of it. That is the way it saves souls, makes us live happily.

“Let’s be artists, right now,” he challenges us in his lecture, Be An Artist, Right Now, available for viewing (with a transcript) or download with subtitles.

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Here are four exercises to try doing during any break you find weekdays or evenings or weekends. You’ll feel so much better for having taken the time to set that artist prisoner free for even a short while. Submerge yourself in what you are doing without judging it and your concentration will become so laser-focused that everything else falls away and the part of the brain that self-monitors and quiets impulses will rest. Now your inner critic, the voice of doubt and disparagement, the devil as Kim names it, doesn’t have a place to reside. You won’t be burdened with being critical and you’ll become courageous, seeing new possibilities and sharing them with the world.

1. Sit in a place you don’t usually sit. Think about a problem you are unable to solve concerning choices or others. Now look out from where you are sitting. What looks different to you from this vantage point than things normally look to you? Describe it. Then think about the problem. Do you have something in your description that is a hint of how to solve the problem?

2. Make a visit to someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Bring something along with you to start a conversation. Tell the person you are visiting what the object you brought along makes you think about. Ask them what it makes them think about. Write about both ideas.

3. Move something around in the rooms where you live. It can be big or small, a piece of furniture or an ornament or counter top appliance. Every time you pass this moved object, you will notice yourself noticing it. What does that feel like? What does surprising yourself this way make you think about? Write some paragraphs or haiku (a wonderful explanation in Michael Dylan Welch’s 2007 article for Writing It Real) or Alan Ginsberg’s idea instead–the 17 syllable American sentence.

4. Give a name to something that doesn’t have a name–the way people smile when they pass you on the street even when they aren’t really noticing you, for instance. Or the way someone’s dog licks your fingers to say hello. Think about instances in which you can apply this new word. Have fun with it. Write about them or post them on Facebook.

When you come at things in fresh and unexpected ways you are stepping back on the path lit by your creativity.

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“Just do it,” Kim tells us, were the words of Martha Graham when she visited Korea at age 90 and was asked by a reporter what a person had to do to become a good dancer.

Yes, don’t worry; just do it. Make things up as Kafka did, practice using your imagination to make sense; then you’ll see the world in a new light.

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You can find more ideas for fostering the creative part of you online from Sarah Zielinski’s article for NPR with five ways to spark your creativity. There are also a number of other captivating Ted Talks on the creative spark.