Destined for Destiny
I never realised how difficult it is to sculpt something out of thin air, to create a tangible presence out of nothingness; and yet that is what creativity is all about. I never realised how out of sync it is to create, as most people just go about their lives like nothing ever happens to them. To create is to step out of that monotone and that complacent regularity and make a move towards something imaginative. And the moment you do that, you find out how out of the ordinary you are.
The most equitable form of creativity, in my humble and biased opinion, is to create stories for others to follow. Stories which narrate lives and reality, and beyond that, stories that mix the abstract with the real. Each of those aspects eventually comes down to the words, and beneath those layers lies two things - the pause of a pen or the blink of a cursor.
One is messy, and I need not tell you which one. The pause of a pen has created masterpieces in all aspects of life, and mind you, I do not just limit masterpieces to mere contemporary and orthodox art. Science and technology, visual arts, and many more have thir roots in the pause of the pen. The brilliant thing about the pen is that even when it is paused, it still possesses the ability to create. So much of the cruder and finer versions of art, craft and graft have passed through the pauses of the bored pen and have been blinded from the public eye, that it remains a valid shame.
Things have however, transitioned more towards better tools, and the pause of the pen has been replaced by the empty, timed and never-ending blinks of a cursor. What happens within these blinks is a similar process to the pause of the pen, but with a key difference. The cursor cannot create artistic trash the same way a pen can. Sure, multiple files can exist which can be eventually deleted, mimicking an angry tear of a paper bloodied by ink; but it is merely what it is - a mimic. It is like dating long distance in the twenty first century, stuck in rectangles of a screen, quick yet hazy and not as satisfying. The yearning pen will always be more distraught than anything else - just ask Franz Kafka.
It is fitting, then, that my life has passed in between the blinks of the cursors for the past 8 years, and the only time I felt a little alive was when the rectangles in my life spouted into reality once every six months for a few years. Despite that, I continued to strive for art, craft and graft, and today it leaves me at a junction where not many people find themselves in. It is not merely a geographical junction, albeit geography does play a big role in it. It is a point where the paths ahead of me spray towards complete opposites as well as total compliments. It is a path where anonymity meets the simple need to exist, and the larger self-actualizing needs clash with the chance to be popular. It is a node where I have to choose between new normalcy and traditional prosperity, and while that isn't a unique choice to make, my tryst with the pen AND the cursor makes it a little different.
Maybe somewhere along the line I will look back at claim that Robert Frost was wrong. But to be fair, he merely claimed that the road less travelled makes a difference; and never specified on the type of difference. I blame my English teachers for claiming that the difference it made for him was positive and that outfoxing the convention is the route to greatness. I had examples of greatness in convention right in front of my eyes, and the tales of non conventional greatness were merely.. creativity.
As I try to break down that creativity by bring on the road less travelled, I wonder if it was forged with the pause of pens or the blinks of a cursor. Destiny is a creative piece of intervention whose author I do not know of, but I have a feel it wasn't written on pens or cursors.
Maybe it is written in something much more indelible. Like chisel on a stone. Maybe it is not as long and complex as it seems, because it was written with a quill.
Art, craft, and graft. Made by either the chisel, quill, pen or cursor. We are all bound to one moment, where in something paused while writing our destinies, and in that very solemn moment, probably in the quietness of the night, we were tied to our destiny. Maybe within that pause there exists a multiverse, but until then we are swimming around in the same pool of destiny.
We are destined for destiny.