I’ve spent most of my life exploring and engaging in various creative pursuits, primarily through music, fabric, and writing. But I’ve always been drawn to these activities because they make it easy for me to focus on the moment. I can forget about everything that happened in the past or my thought about what might happen in the future. This is especially true with music due to its nature and reliance on time. Music can only be observed in the moments as they pass, and then it’s gone forever. The feelings or emotions it can produce, however, can last a lifetime.

Our society tends to overlook these creative pursuits and perceives them as less important...We give things with functionality and usefulness more value. A car helps us travel places faster than walking, or a computer organizes our work and makes things easy and more efficient. This perspective works its way into our individual lives. It can cause uncertainty about the worthiness of creative pursuits that may not seem to contribute a quantifiable function or purpose to our lives or the lives of others....but living a creative life can teach us things that a fast car or expensive computer cannot.

The Créative, with all those unfinished works of art revolving around them and dependent on them, can still produce a plethora of inspiration as if they had nothing else in the universe to do.

Living creatively is a mindset. It's about creating for the sake of creating. Creative living can help us develop mindfulness and awareness and improve our overall health and well-being. Focusing on the act of creation rather than a specific end goal or objective can turn creation into a meditative experience that allows us to enter the flow state and become one with the process. Creating gives us an opportunity to focus on the present moment and simply find joy in the act of creating without being concerned with whatever the results may be.

We all know that creativity comes in many forms. From drawing and design to fashion and music, the quality of our ideas is what inspires us. But the act of creating is what brings us the joy of doing these things simply for the joy of doing them and puts us into the moment without needing a specific purpose or outcome along the way.

**An Artist is not paid for their labor but for their vision-Becca Piastrelli**

Think about the moments of creation like a river. The river continues to flow regardless of what its end result will be. It doesn't worry about where it will end up or how it will look along the way. It just flows because that's what it does. It doesn't need to assign meaning to its path, logic, or reason for its actions. Instead, it just flows for the purpose of being what it is.

As creativity leads to creation, so too can creation lead to mindfulness, and developing and practicing mindfulness can, in turn, enhance our creativity. Awareness of the moment can give us a perspective that allows us to observe things with a broader perspective and find something we may have overlooked before that leads to deeper inspiration. Developing mindfulness can give us a better understanding of ourselves and to better communicate our ideas and self-expression. By sitting with and exploring our thoughts and emotions, we can pull more fruits from the tree of our inner creative.