Making Sense of my Muse (Part 1)

Regardless of the form of art that one seeks to create, there is a process that they will follow to open the creative channels for what they want to express, or perhaps more accurately, for that which seeks expression through them. Just the other day, I was asked by a friend about the creative process behind my writing and after giving it some thought, my mind turned to the principal role that my source of creativity (what is sometimes referred to as a or the muse) plays in enabling my writing. Given that I am currently in the process of researching for my second book, with my writing on it to commence next year, his probing provided a pertinent opportunity to reflect on how I go about the task, and perhaps refine my writing routine. When it comes to my writing, I am not one who has really ever thought about strategies to optimise the process because that has never been my focus, but the process itself does interest me very deeply, hence me wanting to explore it here and perhaps draw out some useful insights.

The more that I have partaken in writing over the years, the more I have experienced it as a calling that is central to my life purpose. At no stage have I ever felt that I chose it as something to pursue for either intrinsic or extrinsic rewards, and a more accurate characterisation of how I came to engage with it is that it chose me as a dance partner. The labels that could be given to the source of this vocation, or the one who calls to us or chooses us to find life in a particular domain, are numerous, and I think that God, our spirit or the universal life force are all apt descriptors of it. A fundamental feature of that source energy is its creative capacity. To be animated by it is to be endowed with the ability to create, or act upon the world in ways that are unique to our disposition, talents, native interests and the moment in time that we are born into. Here, it is worth appreciating that being by its essence, necessitates or mandates doing, for without a purpose for being that determined and meaningful action gives expression to, there is no reason for its existence.  

Through no effort or conscious desire of my own, I am drawn to writing, I love it, and there is no other outlet, other than perhaps speaking about the things I write about, that gives me the feeling that I am manifesting my greatest possible contribution to the world of which I am a part. Of all the potential things that I could have possibly been drawn to, or have a natural capacity for, it is this art that weaves together who I am with the need that the world has for my being. While some may just reduce this integral association down to randomness, I think that what that perspective misses is the intentionality and purpose that is so clearly present from having an internal orienting force that moves one towards something in a meaningful way. Were it just something I inherited from my parents DNA, like their physical features or personality traits, it would be unsurprising, yet, there is very little in my family history to suggest that I would grow up to be a writer.

Over the course of my life journey, there have been numerous instances of being prompted by forces external to myself that I didn’t understand at the time towards a union with my spirit from which this calling could be more clearly heard. Whether those forces are referred to as serendipity or grace, the effect of their intervention was a clarity around the very nature of things that I was given life to explore and decipher truth about. As an example, before I could write about what distinguishes a job from a career or a calling, I had to experience these divergent paths for myself. For another person whose path doesn’t involve writing but some other field of endeavour, the journey that led them there would be very different and particularised for the time and place that they occupied. Just as each of us has been created for a specific purpose, so has the world been created to accommodate the enactment of that purpose. When we come to connect with our calling and find this niche in which can flourish, we learn that this fit is not random but coincidental, in the sense of the word that sees things come together as they were meant to. Just as the three sides of a triangle come together to form that shape, so does the shape of our life cohere and make sense when we honour the providential nature of life that blesses us not only with the gifts to make our novel contribution, but with a place to belong as that offering is made. A large part of why we feel so unfulfilled as we eschew our spiritual nature to partake in a job or career that doesn’t have this deep resonance with who we are or what we have been called to do is that in the domains where that job or career is worked, we don’t feel that we belong there. How that is experienced is as an unhospitable and jarring dissonance that lays waste to the means of our authentic service and thriving.