Can you be a child at play when you create?
Play is a major part of the creative process but how often do we let that child side of ourselves run free, showing us the wonder of the world around us and breaking through our self-imposed limitations? In this short episode, Sage discusses the role that play, well, plays in the creative process, why children have such instant access to the imagination, and what we can learn from the way children see and interact with the world and how we can recover that and bring it into our creative time.
Settle down for an exploration of play and how it can free you and your creative work.
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Then come back for the next installment. Until next time, keep that muse fed!
Credits:
Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Music by Playsound
Transcription (AI transcribed, unedited due to lack of budget. Please excuse the copious errors.)
Hello, all you wonderful creative people. Thank you for joining me on, um, the Sage Arts podcast. I’m Sage, your solo host. Today we have a short one, just a little something to get you to the very end of the year and start you thinking about how you want to approach your work as the new year begins. I am, as usual, in my podcast closet, as I like to call it. It’s rather late at night because I’m trying to tape this before I get on the road to see my family in Colorado for a quick week. So hopefully I’m not too tired and I won’t mumble something I’m known for when I get sleepy, but I’m actually quite the night out, so working until like, 02:00 A.m. Is actually kind of normal for me. For me, there is something about working when the world is shut down for the day that makes it so much easier for me to focus, especially on creative work or writing. It’s also a great time because you tend to be less critical of your work when you’re touch tired. I also like to write first thing in the morning for this reason. So if you have problems with having a lot of internal critical jibber jabber going on when you create, try getting into your creative work first thing in the morning or late at night whenever you’re not fully awake. You can even take a nap and try to work after that. Just anything where your brain is closer to the theta and alpha brainwave modes. Uh, theta is considered the creative brain wave mode to be in, and then alpha is the flow state. It’s when you’re alert and aware, but your brain is very focused and you want to stay farther away from the beta, which is when you’re fully alert but dominantly analytical. Which brings me to today’s subject. I’d recently read some interesting stuff about children’s brain waves and how in younger children under the age of five, theta brainwaves dominate, while the beta brain wave dominates brain function from the age seven and onward. That’s the brainwaves that adults spend most of their time in because it’s the alert and analytical thing, right? Since theta is most commonly associated with creativity, it makes sense that children have such a broad imagination because it’s not commonly disrupted by the analytical beta brain waves, not until they’re older. Thinking about this brought back the memory of the time in 2014 when I worked on an issue of the Polymer Arts magazine that had the theme Time to Play. It was, at least at that time, one of the hardest issues I had worked on. It wasn’t because of a lack of things to
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say on the subject and all of its related concepts, but rather because I had always tried to balance each issue with a little bit of philosophy, along with ways to improve skills and sales and of course, have lots of pretty things to look at. But the idea of Play turned out to be a lot more abstract and difficult to get down in kind of a black and white manner than many of my previous concepts and themes for the magazine. But I do have a strong belief that Play should be a part of our process and so I didn’t give up on it and eventually I did get contributors who felt the same way and it really came together as a wonderful celebration of whimsy childlike wonder and just not taking ourselves seriously all the time. What I like most about the idea of Play is that it’s a focus about exploration, about existing in the moment and creating memories, that kind of thing. As adults we’re kind of taught that Play is a way to just pass time and relax rather than it actually being a constructive way to explore new ideas and grow in artistic or even business endeavors. For children, Play is part of their learning process as they investigate and gain and understand the world. I think it’s sad that as we get older we lose that way of looking at the world. Isn’t there always so much to learn and so many more ways we can grow and appreciate the wonder of our world if we just stop to look and investigate it and explore it? A long time ago I read this interview with the highly accomplished cellist Pablo Casal’s. I believe I pronounced that correctly. When he was asked by the interviewer why he still practiced at the age of 90, he replied because I think I’m making progress. So I just love that. I love the fact that this musician does not see himself as the master we deem him to be, but as a lifelong student who knows there’s always more to learn and I think that’s a key part of the childlike exploration and curiosity we should all try to recover and hold on to. For a long time I felt that I never really grew up. I have to admit though, that in recent years I feel like my childlike side has been suppressed a bit and I think just because there’s been a lot of non childlike things happening in the world for my family we’ve had a number of people pass away, as did a lot of people, unfortunately, with the pandemic. But I think it really pushed me into a role of intense responsibility and taking care of things and making sure we were secure and safe and all that. Before then I
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remember occasionally actually being told to act my age and I used to somewhat regularly wear pigtails which would sometimes elicit a comment from people asking if it was really appropriate for an adult to wear pigtails. Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me because how and why would we define something as only being for children rather than adults, at least in terms of what we wear or how we present ourselves to the world. It’s disheartening to me that some people feel we need to fulfill a particularly adult role that excludes childlike activities and attitudes. I mean, just think of how much more beautiful your days would be if you always stopped to get excited by, like, a new bug or flower. Or if you questioned all the mysteries three year olds are constantly asking, like, why is the grass green and why is the sky blue? Or why are the clouds formed like that? Or if you stop just to listen to someone else’s story every day and let yourself be fascinated by their individual experience. I think all these little discoveries and mysteries and tales translate into new ways of seeing the world, and these are exactly what inspires creative people, right? I think I’ve always fancied myself an explorer. That is generally how I approach things, by wondering and questioning. Not all artists or craftspeople are exploratory, but that doesn’t mean play doesn’t have its place. Even for the most serious and logical creatives, play does come into play, maybe even more so for the logical and even the scientifically minded. I mean, just imagine a kind of typical scientist bent over his or her beakers and microscopes and machines. Isn’t that just play with an end result in mind? I think artists are very much like scientists, actually. We have some kind of end result we’re after, or we play around with the material to see what kind of results we can get. Artists or scientists. I think one needs to have an open and curious mind to do either of those kinds of jobs. I also love that play is about action. You can’t play by just observing. You can’t play by sitting on the sidelines. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to personally get in there and muck around. I personally believe that creativity and creating things is an essential part of being human. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re creating fishing flies or baking cakes or gardening or throwing pots or making huge oil paintings. I think we all need that outlet, that externalizing of the things that are inside of
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us, putting them out into the world in some kind of tangible or shareable way. So what turned out to be one of the hardest parts of putting that magazine issue together was that when you’re talking about play, you don’t really want to talk about specifics because you’re trying to encourage people to access their internal curiosity, not tell them what to do. The idea of play itself is about not being led, restricted, or given the idea that there is only a certain way to do something. And that reminded me that in reality, that’s my outlook on pretty much everything creative. I remember from high school on, um, through art school, and even to more recent classes that I’ve tried to take, I just could never follow the teachers instructions. I would absolutely learn the materials and the techniques and listen to everything they had to say. But if they gave us a specific thing to make, I would always end up doing something a little different or maybe a lot different. It got me in trouble a little bit here and there. I had some teachers, especially more recent teachers in the craft centric classes that I’ve taken that would get really frustrated with my lack of adherence to their instructions. But once I understood the materials and the techniques, I wanted to play with them. I wanted to see what they could do. I wanted to see what I could do with them and what intrigued me about them. So maybe play won’t be popular in certain circumstances, but as they say, you got to know the rules to break them, but then definitely go out and break them. And I think that’s where play comes in. I would say if play hasn’t been a big part of your creative process, or even if it has, maybe assess or reassess how much you really let yourself go and just play without feeling like you have to have an end product. When you’re done, if you find you always have that critic on your shoulder, maybe it’s time to, uh, have sessions in your creative space that you intend not to create anything that anyone else will see and that you maybe even will destroy it at the end of it. I know that sounds kind of severe, but it’s one of the best ways to get rid of your critic because it’s not going to matter to anybody but you what you get out of that session. And if your objective is to simply play and get yourself kind of creatively loosened up, then knowing you literally are not going to have anything to walk away with can be really liberating. I know for some people it could also be a bit stressful
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and may cause some anxiety. But see if you can do it. Just allow your curiosity and a lack of inhibition to have its way with you and your materials. Discovery, even when a particular outcome is sought, isn’t good at taking directions either. In fact, most discovery is not planned, but chanced upon. You can have a process and a theory and maybe even an expectation. But if you want real discovery to take place, you need to let go of control. You need to make mistakes. You need to be silly, be nonsensical and toss out the rules. Just let your inner child step out. Think of how children play. Or even better, go watch a child with a pot of paint and a paintbrush or a bucket of blocks. But there isn’t a lot of instruction given to children when it comes to doing art, not when they’re really young. They might initially be told how to use the paint markers or clay or whatever so they don’t destroy the rug. But then it’s just now go make something then. The children make wonderful things, sometimes even without seeing anything made from the materials they’re working with. And they often on top of that. Ignore the directions to paint on the paper, keep the clay on the table, or avoid wrapping up their classmates with the yarn in their minds. They don’t need direction, and they don’t see limitations. So I think the question is, can you be a child at play as we enter this new year? Maybe that’s the first challenge we should all give ourselves. I’m sure play is already part of your process in some form, but see this as an opportunity to really break through any limitations you may artificially have given yourself. This can be a chance to refocus the part of your creative process that maybe you’re not finding fun anymore. If childlike exploration and play for the sake of random discovery is not something you’ve done, I do hope you’ll try it. Just let that child out and marvel at all the wonderful things you’ll discover along the way. So that’s all I’m going to say for today. Hopefully, this has given you some things to think about, and maybe now you can head outside and really take in the world and try to look at things the way a child would look at the world, the things that they would find exciting and wondrous. I have to say, having taken up creative photography in the last couple of years, it has really done that for me. Because not only do I go out and see things that inspire me as a creative person, I’m actually using those points of inspiration as the material
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for my art form. I feel like I am now letting myself go and be more childlike with my latest creative material. So you take a look at what you’re doing and see if you can find a way to work in more childlike way. In the meantime, I’d like to encourage you to look at the time that we spend together as dedicated creative time in your creative space so you can say to yourself, sage is going to have another episode on Friday. I’m going to put time aside this weekend to spend with her in my creative space and create and just be dedicated to that. So if you’ve been having problems motivating yourself to get into your creative space and do something, this is a perfect way of transitioning from your busy day into creative mode, and then hopefully, that will set aside all of your worries and concerns and all that adulting and let you just play. I wish you all a, uh, very happy New Year. I hope this is going to be a fantastic 2023 for all of you, and I hope to be a part of it. So if you haven’t yet followed the Sage Arts podcast and you’re listening to this on a player, please go ahead and hit that follow button so you get notices of new episodes. And as always, if you have comments or thoughts or stories, especially if you have really good stories having to do a play, I’d love to hear them so we could share them in a future podcast. You can write me at The Sagearts@gmail.com with any of that kind of stuff. You can go to the website at www, the sagearts.com, using the contact page there to write me, or you can click the red button in the bottom right corner to leave me a voice message. And if you haven’t caught on, I have a voice message option there. Because if you give me something really good and it’s well recorded, I could include it in a podcast. Wouldn’t that be fun? You can also reach out to me on Facebook, at facebook. Comsageartspodcast, or the same thing on Instagram. Instagram. Comthesageartspodcast. That’s all one word. And if you are so inclined as to support this podcast, I do have a Buy Me A Coffee page at Buy Me A Coffeefordsagearts, where you can make a one time contribution. So until next time, explore, play, and be curious. I, uh, look forward to having you join me again on the Sage Arts podcast.
