Digging and Filling the Hole: Consuming and Creating
By: Steve Bielecki
Tags: Creativity, Consumerism, Creative, Create, Find Your Voice

This is why we, you and I must create. Because I cannot only consume any longer. I can no more only appreciate and agree or disagree. I must have my own thoughts, my own voice, in hopes that someone — maybe you, maybe not — feels like me, or has their perspective click three degrees to the right or to the left, or north or south, because of these words, because of what I thought and — for once — said. And in saying, I am in fact doing. In creating, and releasing words into the world, I am giving them the freedom to be more than these words on a screen, the freedom to exist and commingle with the rest of the pile of stuff in the hole, that great mass for which we may have some use, we may have ultimate use or for which we may have no time, but with which we must all reckon if only for the fact that this stew, when boiled together for years and years as it is, with new ingredients added every second, dictates the world we live in. Consuming it to some degree or another is something that we all must do — that is just existence. But adding to it is something that we must choose to do.

I am not sure that merely, in effect, writing about writing, as I largely am here, is enough for me. I likely need to write more, about other topics, about more than this meta exercise. I may need to draw, to compose and to photograph. But I do know that this is a start. To begin generating, manufacturing, words and ideas is a first step. It allows me to explore my own thoughts, and to engage with you, but importantly for me, it also allows me to feel more akin to those that I admire — the authors, the songwriters, the singers, the painters and the designers — those who see a blank canvas and say, “Leave it here; I will fill it.”

It allows me to feel a part of a different peer group, those with the will to express and to tie themselves to a thought in a moment, and to let that snapshot exist outside of them, to be judged and live on or forgotten and lost to history. And it allows me to feel freer, to feel — as I said — transcendent of my repeatable daily activities, to embrace the things that I am that are not the most obviously visible to the world, to wear something that, absent my effort to create and to learn what it takes to create such a thing or an analogous thing, may feel like a flag of fraud on my back, instead of something — a symbol for a type of person — to which I am actively aspiring.

Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash

This is the power of creation, for each of us. In creating and generating an output, we are generating ourselves, as I have done 0.0000001% more than I had before writing this piece. We come to realize that we have only scratched our own surface, that through the hard work of sitting down and building something — sentences, images, sounds, conversations, feelings — we unearth depths from within us, all to be shoveled into that hole for the rest of the world and humanity to see and to learn from or not. We are no longer stuck only excavating things from the hole, becoming bloated on all there is on offer without truly processing it, refining it and creating its next iteration. We, instead, can pour forth and say, “I have seen what there is, considered it, and built my own tiny piece of this puzzle… let me now what you think.