A Chic Paris Lockdown – Part 2: Day 10 – The Many Shades of Creativity
November 12, 2020
Fiona Ferris extolls the virtues of expressing our creativity in Day 10 of her book, 30 Chic Days At Home. She writes movingly about how using our imagination and creating something real with our own hands can bring us a sense of flow in the moment and a sense of fun and accomplishment when we complete our project. Some examples might be to bake something, sew or knit something, use craft-kits, do a puzzle, work in your garden, color, draw, paint or sketch. The main point is to create something that captures our imagination and that the actual doing of is fun and exciting.
As you may be able to tell with the words that I’ve chosen in the last paragraph, even though I agree, passionately, with Fiona’s point, I am a bit low on energy and inspiration at the moment. There was a Zoom meeting this morning, the pre-meeting meeting and prep, the post-meeting wrap-up and minutes writing, then fixing lunch (when I was already hungry – foolishly, I did not prep my lunch early so I could just pop it into the microwave for 45-60 seconds, and presto, have a hot, tasty lunch). And my to-do list for this afternoon is a bit long and stressful. We have a meeting with the Prefecture of Paris tomorrow that requires lots and lots of original paperwork and copies of all originals and 3 copies of this and 4 copies of that and let’s not even mention what I look like in the required (multiple) official photographs!) Each of us needs to have our own “dossier” (with all of the aforementioned copies.) I’m just happy that the Prefecture is still open even in the lockdown!
With all of this in mind, when I reread Day 10, I did not feel the sudden surge of energy to jump up and start baking (one of my favorite creative things to do.) Happily, my daughter saved me. She wandered into the kitchen with some plastic bottles to put in the recycling bin. She was tidying her bathroom. Hey, tidying up a space to make it more appealing and useful is a form of creativity! I followed her back and helped to rearrange some fairy-lights. That’s my “creativity” for the day. And, truth be told. I did feel a bit of a lift in my energy level as I returned to verifying that my many stacks of papers contain everything that could possibly be asked for, in triplicate, tomorrow morning.
If you happen to feeling a bit bedraggled or at a low ebb, I highly recommend following Fiona’s advice to “do something creative” – even if it is a very small thing like rearranging fairy lights for only a few minutes.
