As I was considering what my creativity exercise would be for this week, I realized that I’ve been meaning to waste time creatively!
What the what?! How could I have forgotten?
And then, I found myself feeling guilty. Guilty that I’d not wasted time RIGHT. That my time wasting had been SUB-PAR.
Now, for sure, the Time Wasting Police were going to come after me. I began to line up my evidence of creative time wasting.
♦I I drew a picture of a little house.
♦I performed my imagined reaction to taking a luge run for Stephanie as we watched one of those unimaginably brave (or crazy?) people fling themselves down that track.
♦I I repeated my performance but for downhill skiing, screaming especially hard during the part where the hill looked absolutely vertical.
♦I I practiced my Canadian/Minnesotan accent while watching curling.
This was nowhere near enough stuff to report, and not nearly as imaginative as I’d hoped. I would be shown up as a fraud. The whole idea was ridiculous. How could I have been so stupid?! My career as a creativity coach was over!!!!!
The exclamation points knocked me out of my self-induced spiral into perfectionism.
Wait a second.
There are no Time Wasting Police.
There aren’t even any Creativity Police.
The only thing that was real was my attachment to perfectionism, and wasting time creatively can NOT be a party to perfectionism.
Time to be kind to myself. Time to give myself space.
Time to waste a little time creatively.
You should see the picture I drew of a little house, eh?