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How Our Senses Influence Our Creativity: Vision
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 20, 2008
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. ~ Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of US (1856 - 1924)
The beginning of the year we envision what that year will look like for us. According to the dictionary vision “is a special sense by which the qualities of an object (as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived and which is mediated by the eye.”
What if using this special sense we look at our lives in a new way? My eyesight is not the best. When I got my new glasses the world came back into view. I didn’t know what I had been missing. Not that everything sparkled; I couldn’t help but notice that I needed to revisit cleaning my apartment. But the fuzziness I had been living with disappeared and the edges came back into focus. It was like a sense I didn’t have before was discovered.
You are an artist and your life is what you are creating. Bring light when you can. As Goethe said on his deathbed, his last words: ‘More light!’ ~ Jan Phillips, Author, The Museletter
Making our way through the world we use all our senses. We touch, taste, feel, smell and listen. We can’t get away from all of this stimulation. Our creative selves swim in a sea of senses. The question is can we use this to be our better selves?
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ~ Andre Gide French critic, essayist, & novelist (1869 - 1951)
Often, we follow the same daily routine. We can become stale. Our art remains the same, our words bore even us, and the music we play has no feel to it. Our routine can blind us to other possibilities. You want to write that book on whales but what really resides in you is a play about your family. Each day you plod along joylessly struggling to find the words. Still each day, each week, and every year you put the book on your goal list. Words fail you. The struggle is to create a new vision for yourself; bravely entering a new world in which you find true joy in creating.
I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. ~ Robin Green, Northern Exposure, Burning Down the House, 1992
What can we do? Use our vision differently. Don’t just create your future based on the same old vision of what you know. Discover something new. Envision an adventure for yourself. One that includes new vistas and new dreams never dreamt before.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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