(I wrote this for a friend’s birthday, but in my own academically-dishonest way, I am re-using this piece for blog content and unceremoniously publishing it on my own birthday. Enjoy!)
There’s this part of me that wants to be known as a writer — someone who constructs profound ideas out of carefully arranged words. But let’s be honest, in this universe, writing code pays a whole lot more than writing poorly researched articles. And there’s no way I’m entrusting my daily bread to something as fickle as my writer’s block. Case in point: I went about two years without publishing anything. I would have starved to death and wouldn’t be with you all today.
One of the most discouraging things for me as a writer is this sense that I don’t actually have anything interesting to say, that whatever I would have written has already been said by someone else, somewhere else. (P.S. Darn you, RELEVANT magazine for always beating me to all my best ideas.)
My last piece was a six-point exposition on why Christians should care about the environment. (You can read it here.) But what’s wild is that I thought up the article in 2018. It took me five years to get it out the door. Partially because I kept missing Earth Day, when I wanted to publish it, but also because it seemed like everything there was to say on the topic had already been said — that I had missed some cultural zeitgeist that was ripe for the emergence of my thoughts.
But in some perfect storm of free time, planning, and inspiration, but mostly furious typing on the day of publication, I finished the magnum opus of my post-college years, and emerged with something shaped by pondering, procrastination, and the courage to be unoriginal.
I’ve come to realize the beauty of human creativity lies not in novelty, but in synthesis. Surrendering to the reality that I have never had a truly original thought. But neither has anyone since the God-ordained dawn of time.
Maybe every idea — every combination of those ideas into a coherent body of writing — is some recombination of some other ideas or experiences that its “originator” encountered. Every piece of music, in some way, sounds like something else. Every piece of art has its inspiration in some other creation.
Yet in this all, we find a kind of uniqueness. Not novelty. Synthesis.
Much in the same way that the hundred or so elements are combined into more or less the same set of molecular building blocks that are in you and everyone else around you — and even in the same sorts of patterns. But in the fine details, the unique ways they are arranged and re-arranged in your body, that’s what makes you, you. Add to that the specific concoction of experiences, choices, relationships that are all yours. And so yes, we all see the same world, the same sea of ideas and inspirations, but the way you synthesize those things together — into prose, poetry, art, music — is uniquely yours. The people you will share your creativity with — the people you will touch, your network of connections to the unique you…
As Moredcai says to Queen Esther — perhaps you were born for such a time as this. For God has ordained the time and place that we each live. Even if you say exactly what has been said before, perhaps you were still made to say it in this time and place.
So this quest for true novelty is much like the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — ultimately unattainable. But what if we learned to enjoy the rainbow?
To partake in this creative process, not in an endless struggle to establish ourselves as creators, but surrendering to the reality and limitations of our nature as created beings.
Rather than striving to manufacture our own light (and subsequently burning out), what if we chose to reflect and refract the light all around us — the light that comes ultimately from the sun.
Surrendering my own innate desire to assert myself as God and create ex nihilo, out of nothing, but instead exert this creative impulse as a facet of the imago dei, the touch of the image of God that has been imparted to every human soul.
In turn, this frees us from this existential angst that we’ll never be unique enough, creative enough to matter. Instead, we get to rest in knowing that we matter, individually, to the God who has crafted every particularity of who we are.
And you and I get to weave together the threads He has given — into a beautiful tapestry — whether of words or notes or brushstrokes.
You were created to create.
I’d like to end with some words from some of the great poets of the early 2000’s — really, short of a laureate, I swear — Natasha Bedingfield:
Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot find
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten.
a cup of kimitea 