THE ART OF CREATIVITY: BE MINDFUL!

Here's an extract - it talks about developing mindfulness - of an interesting article on creativity by Daniel Coleman, originally published in Psychology Today:

"So often we go through our days on automatic pilot, but lacking the Zen inner awareness. To a certain degree, we like people and situations to be predictable; we enjoy the habitual and tend to avoid surprises.

But there is a downside to routine: We can easily become fixed in our ways of seeing. Our expectation of how things are supposed to be replaces our capacity to perceive. This can range from not seeing the new color or cut of your partner's hair to not seeing a new approach to your work.

Here are two ideas for refocusing your perceptions and deepening your creative capacity:

Each day, do one thing different from your normal routine. You might go to bed at a new time, or take a new route to work or school.

Or eat something you would never dream of eating.

If you are feeling more adventurous, strike up a conversation with a particularly difficult person—maybe someone you really can't stand—and treat this person in a completely new way. The more pesky the person and entrenched the routine, the more likely you are to shake up your habitual ways of seeing things.

The key is not to think about how to change things or to ask, "What is the best way to change them?" but rather to change things for no other reason than just for the sake of it.

What we see every day becomes ordinary to us. People, sights, sounds, and smells seem to disappear from our awareness. They lose their distinctiveness. One way of dealing with this is to invent a brand-new pattern, a fresh way of seeing the commonplace.

Begin with something as basic as water. The idea is to notice the number of times a day you come in contact with it and the extraordinary number of ways it appears in your life: from a hot shower or the delicate beads of mist on the leaves outside your window to the ice cubes clinking in your glass.

This technique of taking things out of their ordinary context and creating a new pattern for them is a way of making the familiar strange and opening them to a fresh and creative approach."

By the way, here's the link to the original article.