It's no secret to me or anyone who knows me that creating is my life. Whether it be a new song, or a new piece of software, or a new electronic device, I'm always making something. It's been this way for as long as I can remember. I'd say that I probably have at least twenty-five years of experience making stuff. And I'll probably have at least seventy-five before I'm done. It's not a race, although sometimes I wish I could do more than I have time for.
The thing I've started to realize lately though, is that at any one time there is a certain amount of creating will, or creative energy that is ready to go toward some goal. And if it doesn't get used up I feel funny, and once it has been used up, I get a little more (call it creative adrenaline) which boosts my enthusiasm for a while. The thing that I've noticed recently is that it doesn't really matter what I put my creative energy into, the feeling of satisfaction is always the same.
Lately I've been doing a lot of music stuff. In fact, I've been practicing the guitar every day (give or take a few) since April, and I'm starting to get alright at it. And I recently sat down and finally figured out Logic Express enough to make some new tunes with it. I was fighting the "it's not what I'm used to" devil, which came from my many years of music-making with Windows. I've been writing a lot of new songs... certainly more than I have ever written before, and better ones too.
But the one thing that really struck me was that all this creative energy and desire to make music comes at a time when everything else is my life is somewhat boring. I'm not running my business anymore, my pilot training is sort of screwy due to my second teacher leaving, and my work has been rather mundane for a while due to my involvement in production instead of working on new designs. All in all, the only real creative outlet for me right now is through music. And quite frankly, I couldn't be more pleased!
I really hope to continue working on cool hardware and software projects, because I am pretty good at it, and it does pay the bills much better than being a starving artist. But I'm starting to get the feeling that eventually closing my company was one of the best decisions I ever made. (I would say that starting it was also one of the best decisions I ever made.) Also, just going to work and doing stuff, instead of eating and sleeping and dreaming about it (as most business owners do) is amazingly refreshing. When I started my new job after closing my own shop, I was eating and dreaming work, because I was starting a new department, a bunch of new designs, and was the guy making a foray into a whole new area for the company. But now that things are established, I'm keeping a more reasonable schedule, not working insane hours, and just letting my subconscious mind work away on problems while I do other things. It's the first time I've ever felt normal in a job... like this is the sort of pace I could keep for my entire career. Working in live entertainment, a self-made business, and lots of other strange and wonderful opportunities never gave me that feeling. Everything seemed incredibly last-minute and disorganized. We have lots of days like that at my current job, but I'm trying harder to leave at the regular time and just forget about it until the next day. That's the only way to stay sane and mentally healthy enough to fight the fires and solve the problems the next day.
But back to music. It's really sometime that I regret having put on hold for so long. Once in a while I would make a new song, but music really was an on-and-off thing for me ever since I left university. And now I realize that this was mostly due to my interest in other areas, and a need for my creative energies elsewhere. While working on all the projects I did with my own company, there wasn't a lot of energy left for music. That's not to say that I don't want to get passionate about my work anymore, because I'm afraid that it would pull me away from music again. But I think that I'm starting to learn how to regulate the passion and creative energy. Certainly not working on music for so long really left a hole in my soul that only rediscovering music and my voice could fix. But this time off was necessary due to the major shift in attitude I needed to make to accept music as something of my own again after university. Each day, month, and year that goes by brings me closer to my goal of having music be an intricate part of every moment of my life. If I could write, perform, play as well as design incredible music technology my life would be complete. I guess it's always good to have things to look forward to...
