I was just considering about this now, how performance kills creativity. I don’t know if it was Van Gogh or which other artist that used to have lucid dreams, when falling asleep he would do so with a spoon on his hands so that when he was on the verge of shutting down and dreaming the spoon would fall off his hand and he would wake up with lucid visions.
Nowadays it seems that we are so always rushing towards an end-goal, striving for something, looking unto something, that there’s very little space or time for us to just wander together with our thoughts and watch them collide with one another and what might come out of them.
It seems that there’s always something happening, and it draws our attention and drags us in, and then there’s no room at all for us to do some create activity in the blank spaces of our minds akin to some sort of empty sandbox in our psyche.
Therefore, performance apparently is driving us further away from a zone where the adjacent processes of our minds come up with unexpected concurrencies that might be the cornerstone of creative process.
Ócio, is a portuguese word that seems to describe this concept well, to just be with enough headroom to come up with something. Seems like we cannot be bored more anyways…
How could one in any case be at ease with a sort of creative process, while at the same time not succumbing to the everyday expectance of performance in our lives? Or rather, how could we rearrange the patterns of our life in order to make room for a much needed creative outflow?