How to Find Edelweiss in Wintertime

It was an evening at home alone, when I first started thinking about creativity. I sat there staring at the desk in front of me and just felt a desire, an urge, to be creative. And I wanted to make something artsy of some kind: a drawing, a song, a poem. I wanted to be an artist, even if just for a few hours in my house alone. No pressure to show anyone or tell anyone what I did. I relaxed into my chair, closed my eyes for a few seconds and started drawing. When I finished, I had produced a pencil rendering of an old Chinese guy. Nothing special, but I felt completely at peace with myself. It was almost like I had been meditating for an hour. Except better.

But what is it that had happened to me? How come I felt so good after doing a silly drawing? The answer is: I was in the zone. 

The creative flow, or “the zone” in athlete’s terms, is something that every artist seems to be on a hunt for. Yet it’s not something that can be forced. Creative flow has to happen to you, like a kiss from a muse. It’s the optimal state of consciousness for an artist and it is as elusive as an Edelweiss in wintertime. When you’re in the flow, you lose your sense of time, you get a euphoric “high”; you’re calm and still completely focused on what you are doing. It’s a form of being in the now, and that’s why it felt like meditation to me. 

Scientifically speaking, the flow is the perfect balance of challenge and ability, so the balance between task difficulty and your personal skills. The task has to be hard enough to challenge your skills and make you interested in doing it. Not so difficult that you give up, and not so easy that you get bored. The tricky part is to hit that sweet spot or tiny window of perfect circumstances for creative flow. 

Once you know what flow is and what it feels like to you, you have something to aim at and something you can work on getting better at. Paying attention to what caused that sense of flow will make it a lot easier to create it when you need it. 

Another good way to achieve it is to go slightly out of your comfort zone and tread a path you haven’t walked before. Try to approach your creative process with the courage to try something completely different. For example, if you are writing something and you usually have the pictures of it in your mind, try to hear the sounds that are part of your story. 

It really is mostly about finding out what works for you. In an upcoming post I’ll share with you some of the strategies that I use. But for now, keep hiking up those mountains of ideas and looking behind the rocks on your way. Maybe, after all, it won’t be THAT difficult to find your Edelweiss.