Forgiveness and creativity
October 22, 2015 · Chris Peters
It’s been my goal to publish a new blog post approximately every 10 days. 10 days ago, I missed my deadline. No post. Read on to find out how I’m dealing with this issue.
It’s been my goal to publish a new blog post approximately every 10 days. Sounds fairly reasonable and realistic, right? Professionals meet their deadlines, so it’s important for me to keep my promise to myself.
10 days ago, I missed my deadline. No post.
This morning—the next deadline—I begun writing the post that you’re reading right now. This is not how I want to do this, living from deadline to deadline at the last minute.
This is where my thinking was this morning: I can’t even recover after missing a post without going to the last minute. I’m a failure. Why bother?
At this point, it all comes down to one thing getting in the way of my success: fear.
David Allen’s Getting Things Done contains a quote that helps me battle such fear:
It is the act of forgiveness that opens up the only possible way to think creatively about the future at all. Father Desmond Wilson
I’m very hard on myself, and it is easy to get myself down when I experience any kind of failure. If there are some valid excuses for failing (there usually are), I can end up leaning on those to keep repeating the failure.
The antidote: forgiveness.
Lack of forgiveness chains us to the past. If we don’t forgive someone else for wronging us, it’s almost a cliché at this point to say that we’re allowing that person to live in our heads rent-free. If we don’t forgive ourselves, we hold ourselves back in a prison of doubt and blame. Whether or not it’s your fault, lack of forgiveness holds you back.
Forgiveness can be a tall order, but it is the best way to move forward, and it is worth the effort. Did you fail at something recently? Let it go, and focus instead on your next success. Focus on the next blog post. Did someone really wrong you? They’ve probably already forgotten about you, but there you sit, still wasting cycles on anger. Let it go.
Creativity cannot live in the past. It lives in the future and then the present. It doesn’t care about your past failures, so leave those behind.
Where do you want to live? I’ll fight so I can see you in the future.
