Day 28: Alive-est

Challenge: When did you feel most alive recently? Where were you? What did you smell? What sights and sounds did you experience? Capture that moment on paper and recall that feeling. Then, when it’s time to create something, read your own words to reclaim a sense of being to motivate you to complete a task at hand.

In general, I've always felt most alive when I dance. Club dancing, not choreographed dancing -- I've tried that, and I'm terrible at it. But dancing on a dance floor is the one thing that I've never been self-conscious about, even if I'm the only person on the floor. I have no idea why. For some reason, I've just never cared if I look like an idiot. The music fills me up and I express it, and it feels like freedom itself.

Sometimes, I get that feeling when I'm creating something. If I know more-or-less where I'm going, and things are really flowing, I get lost. It used to happen a lot when I was in college. I remember one project in particular -- an accordian book visualizing the poem 'Howl' -- where I was so much in that state that the feeling I had then has become my gold standard of creative zen.

I get it sometimes when I'm in the design phase of a project at work and the ideas are all there and the project is coming together. I get it occasionally in my figure drawing class when I let the critic go and just draw.

It's a wonderful feeling. It's hard to get there. My head is often filled with doubt and fear at the beginning of any creative project, but I've learned that if I just start doing, it's likely to show up eventually.