THE SUBTLE ART OF LETTING GO

My creative process is a mess – a more or less intentional untangling with uncertain outcome. But it does progress, in iterative steps, from a blurred vision towards a manifest one. Just like an object coming into focus. And in that process – to untangle and dehaze – I believe it is possible to distinguish four stages of activity.

Collect

This phase isn't even a phase since it's constantly happening. We collect every damn day, every moment of our lives. Perceptions become memories. Words get their meaning. Facts are learned. Thoughts had. Emotions felt. Notions and ideas developed. And stuff, to some degree, accumulated. All of these collected fragments, and artifacts, are placed upon the shelves of our inner storage room. A treasure vault stacked with a grand collection – our personal history and experience. Our assembled creative currency.

Curate

And when we enter that vault, dive into the inner storage room, and start to explore the artifacts, picking and choosing amongst the collected items, creating order from chaos, we are at the same time creating something new and unique.

Between the first and the second stage, between collecting and curating, the vision is blurred, everything still in a haze. We know there's something there, a pattern to be discerned, a shape to make sense of. And when we begin to curate our collection, the value of our currency suddenly increases. Because ideas and notions, and memories and emotions, yes, even artifacts, can be used over and over to produce new artifacts that evolves into new collections.

To curate is to arrange and re-arrange fragments into something meaningful. It's a playful activity letting us be archeologists, children in awe, and to uncover hidden and sometimes forgotten treasures.

In the inner storage room we're allowed to explore unknown, undiscovered worlds, and piece together mysteries. It is a random, intuitive, almost automatic process, that sometimes doesn't seem to happen either by choice or will…

Trim

… but trimming does. Trimming is a tour-de-force, a phase of angst and hard work. This phase is where we, as creatives, put in the hours, show persistence and dedication. Trimming is when we scratch and bend to make the pieces fit together to reveal something beautiful, horrific or intriguing. It's the part of the process where the vision gets a life of its own and becomes tangible and desirable in its own right. 

This is the phase where we, as creatives, start to serve the vision, wanting it to present itself to the world in the best way possible. And so we make that our assignment, our obligation – to make the vision manifest. Spontaneity and playfulness are replaced with skill and craft.

In this phase the pendulum swings back and forth between being oblivious to what others might think of our vision and caring so much that it sometimes feels like we wont be able to make that leap to the last and most important phase of the creative process. We might even get stuck perfecting, til' we've trimmed away almost everything of the vision we once had…

Display

… and that is why the most crucial ability in creating is practiced in the fourth stage: the art of letting go. In other words: the act of pulling yourself together and getting your stuff out there, out of the inner storage room and your studio, and on display for the world to see.  

Putting on display might not be a necessity for every vision made manifest, but I believe it is our responsibility.

Why? Because not only do we owe it to our visions to be manifest and expressed – we also need to display them and thereby nurture new visions in others!

Only by sharing, making our stuff accessible to others, our currency will be collected, again and again, curated by others, multiplying its worth as it becomes part of the dna of human culture that is ever evolving and reshaping itself. Sharing might very well be our most important task as humans. 

To add to the universe that which would otherwise never be.