Everybody can sing
It’s 4.46 am and I can’t sleep. This has been the most terrible jet-lag I’ve ever experienced. Maybe the fact that my trip from Los Angeles to Bern took about 48 hours door to door, time in which I couldn’t get too much decent sleep is part of the reason I slept the entire first day and stood awake the entire first night. This second night was better: I slept until 3am, but now I am awake again.
So what to do? I started by browsing a little bit Facebook… and then I decided to resurrect my blog.
One of the reasons why I decided to restart writing is the danger of making my way through the information age by “liking” (and more recently “plusing”) links to funny videos, and random pictures of happy people out of any context. The most creative thing I’ve been writing in a long time are short aphorisms and ideas that rarely go beyond a few sentences. In an age where we are all almost as literate as Dostoievsky (this might be pushing it, but it would be interesting to compare the number of words the great russian read in his lifetime with the number of words an average person has read nowadays) it is a pity that our creative output is sometimes limited to 140 characters.
Sure my essays will never be as well-written as the ones of Fyodor but then again, I don’t even aim there, so that’s ok with me.
This reminds me of a scene in the Johannesburg airport. I was flying back to Europe. The lady that was checking my passport was singing while browsing it. I told her “you have a good voice”. She laughed at me and said, “no I don’t have a good voice but i like to sing. In fact there is something special about our culture here in South Africa that you should know - we always sing: be it at a wedding, a funeral, a party, or in any other circumstance. Sure, there are many people that can sing beautifully, and some of them make a career out of it. Not everybody can make a living singing, but everybody can sing while living”. I’ll never forget that lady - she expressed so well my perspective on music. And on creativity in general.
Now, one condition for becoming more creative is being able to find the time to do it. And this might mean, reading and following less of the other people’s output and closing your eyes to many things that go around you so you can dedicate time to be creative yourself. But I think it’s worth it.
If you decide not to read my musings, in order to write your own, I’ll not hold it against you.
