The necessity of creativity

The necessity of creativity and how we find it. Creativity is spontaneous and comes naturally and it is effected by the environment in which it finds itself. Some people thrive on turmoil and chaos whilst others require peace I their lives, a stable base upon which to build something. I’ve decided I fall into the latter. Much of what I write is done in those early morning, pre-dawning hours when I should be asleep but can’t. I’ve had my 4 hours or whatever and I lie awake, feeling the pillow become warmer and warmer, then having to turn it over and lay my face on its cool cotton whilst a team of chimps start chattering and climbing about inside my head. I can do nothing except get up; get up and write or sometimes read. I just can’t lay there with my head awhir, brain in overdrive and thoughts good and bad, positive and negative, circle and crash into each other, like 10 year olds in bumper cars.
Peace in my life: that’s the one. Upon reflection, insomnia may not appear to be a peaceful, stable base and, to some extent it isn’t because it becomes host to other problems which manifest themselves later on. However, the tranquillity of a silent flat in a small, silent block down a narrow silent street at 4.30am brings a peace of its own. The thunderstorm and lashing rain of two hours ago have decided to come back.
As I lie awake and listened to the crashing rain I thought of the plants on the balcony; the hardy rosemary, which hates excessive water but this ‘summer’ shows no let up. The delicate Venus fly trap, the only thing he’s catching is probably a cold. The young, reaching olive tree yearning for the sun. If these meteorological conditions occur (and they do) while I’m in the office I just shrug and don’t give it a second thought. This morning in my wakefulness I tried to come up with a plan for recovering them from the teeming torrents of water, and only the fact that I would have got soaked doing so stopped me.
So, back to the chaos or tranquillity question, even though it wasn’t a question.
Insomnia creates chaos in my head, there’s no denying that. It kick-starts the engine of my early morning and keeps revving, whether I want it or not. If it’s feeling generous it will sometimes turn off again whilst other times I need to let the clutch out and take it for a spin. It can and does causes problems later when I should be facing the day with enthusiasm and instead I’m sat, yawning, feeling bags delate beneath my eyes. However, this same insomnia leads me by the hand from my bed to my studio next door, where peace, the true, unblemished silence, is broken only by the scratching of my Caran d’Ache 2H pencil.
We could take this down to a completely new level and discuss the intricacies of what lie at the heart of every insomniac’s problem: however that isn’t for now or this page. A this moment in time my head is full of the consequences of a self-inflicted chaos I’ve brought into my life and now must deal with.
The necessity of creativity. We all have it but sometimes life pushes it out onto the balcony in the rain to be replaced by other urgencies which need to be kept warm and dry.