Uncluttered Creativity (Atomic Essay Day 10)
A few days back I went through the nerve-wrecking process of cleaning up my Google Chrome tabs and desktop. The latter looked clean at a surface level, but there was a sneaky Russian Doll of folders somewhere. You know the one? 'Untitled' > 'To sort' > 'New', we’ve all done it.
Oddly enough, even the process was not very pleasant, the outcome was quite cathartic.
More often than not, creativity and clutter are often said in the same breathe. Chaos is deemed to be at the heart of Creativity. At a personal level if you ask me, I've found myself feeling quite stifled by clutter and chaos. I constantly feel the need to make sense of it - write, draw, mindmap it out just so that my mind can fully process each element and then find connections.
An artist will tell you that it is sometimes the empty space that makes all the difference. You need emptiness for things to breathe. You need to take that step back and look at a bigger frame, look at things in a different context.
Order is not the opposite of creativity, clutter and chaos is. Creativity is where there is the most amount of order - it is that point where everything seems obvious.