the creative brain

Think about all the things that you do. 

Okay, now think about all the things you wish you did. 

Where do you find joy? 

I have this friend Emily. 

In a nutshell: She is one of my favorites. She is absolutely phenomenal and every time I spend any glimpse of time with her, I feel incredibly lucky. She never complains. She doesn't judge.  She has a servant's heart and loves people. She also is probably one of the funniest and wittiest people too.  I really enjoy spending time with her. 

So here's how it went. 

We met up at one of our catch up spots, the Gypsy Den. We start chatting. 

"Do you still take pictures outside of work?" Emily asks. 

"Not really, I sit at a computer shoot/edit all day. The last thing I want to do is shoot/edit all night too," I say. 

Then we resonate on the topic of creativity. Emily and I both need creativity. 

I hope you can understand what I say by need. It's not something that we like to do. It's something that we need to incorporate into our lives daily to function, to process who we are, to process life and whatever may come. This comes like a light subject but it really comes with a heavy heart. 

Emily makes a schedule for the week allotting herself 30 minutes to do what she wants to do. Blog, Guitar, paint, etc... 

I do the same. I write what creative endeavor I need to do for the day to predestine that it will happen. Which seems completely out of the element of what creativity should be. It should just happen, right? Only in a perfect world. 

But Instead,  Emily and I both do similar things. 99.9% of the time my discipline fails me.  We do whatever we can to turn our brains off. Which is rather hard to do for the both of us. As great as shutting our brain off for a night sounds. A discipline that is important every so often, it is still something that kills creativity. Especially when making it a nightly ritual. 

So here I am wondering if anyone feels the same. How do you motivate yourself to keep the creative juices flowing especially when you just want to shut your brain off?