Creativity is both natural and honed as it ebbs and flows with our daily lives.
I have spent the last 3 years of my life working on a master’s degree which has pulled most of my time (and almost all of my mental faculties) away from photography and creative media. To say that this has been a challenge is an understatement at best. Many times I have said to my wife, “I hate that the one thing I want to do most (photography) is the one thing I can’t do at all.” It is difficult to be pulled in directions that take you away from your passions, very difficult.
To make things worse, because creativity is one of those things that must be honed, the less you are doing something with it, the harder it seems to just do it. I have seen this in my life when I’ll be given the opportunity to do something with photography or design and end up simply sitting on it for a long time–simply because I don’t know how to even get started.
I look back over projects I’ve worked on in the past and wonder how I was able to accomplish those things. Further, I’m sitting on the cusp of moving back overseas and delving back into a full time creative media role.
It is at these times that I remind myself that I can hone back in the skills I have set aside over the past years. I can pick up my camera, challenge myself with projects, learn new techniques, remember old ones. Retrain my eyes to see the world around me, start writing and story telling again. There is so much opportunity ahead and I am excited to be getting back out there.
These are the moments when I realize the opportunities all around me. There is a whole world out there.
We cannot always be dreaming of what we’d like to do only to convince ourselves that we’ll never accomplish it. Rather, we must get out and do it…
James Bunch 