Creativity & Expression

I have had phases of experiencing the phenomenon that many writers before me have gone through- ‘The block’. In fact, the very first reflection on this site has been about it. It may sound like an absurd concept, but it can be as real as anything can be, even though all of it entirely exists inside the mind. There are countless factors that can cause it. Personally, I think mine had to do with this perfection paralysis of some sort. I’d delete anything that didn’t seem to be a fully-formed thought or find reasons on how something on similar lines already exists somewhere. 

I fought through it by understanding the concept of an intellectual garden. There is no garden that only contains full grown plants. A garden is home to countless different form of plants including herbs, shrubs, and huge trees. There are seedlings in the nascent stage of growing, weeds that need to be plucked out and plants that need pruning for growing better. Thoughts can exist on paper without being fully formed. They are subject to pruning, or being discarded entirely later. Gardening comes later and it only holds any significance whatsoever if there’s room for growing first. Growing requires fertilisers, it requires rain and watering and it requires believing that the soil is fertile in the first place. No gardener plants seeds in a soil whose fertility is in question. 

So, I started tending to my thoughts like I’d tend my plants each morning. Even if the idea feels half formed, it finds room on a paper. Even if it seems like something that’s said before, it still finds room on the paper. No two apple trees are exactly alike after all. It is the same inquiry that everyone has dived in since the beginning of civilisation. Everyone seeing the same sun with a different set of eyes. There is no point being caged by the box of perfection as nothing beautiful in the universe fits perfectly in boxes anyway. The beauty is in asymmetry, the beauty is in the flow. 

The flow, which functions as the opposite of the block within this framework, is utterly mystical for me, and has been described similarly by many others. Creativity is not merely a personality trait or a professional category. It is a mode of engaging with reality, one that treats the given world as a draft rather than a finished text.

Shedding habits that restrict the flow has been part of this practice. In doing so, not becoming someone new but only peeling off the weight that came between growth and revealing what was always there underneath. There is something psychological at work there. The mind seems to make room for creative flow only when it knows that the body, as its medium, truly respects itself.

There is a particular experience that artists describe repeatedly. Writers speak of sentences arriving before they know what they are trying to say. Photographers return home and discover the image and the meaning it holds only after looking through the photographs. Dancers find that the body makes a movement before the mind can plan it. In these moments, creating art feels less like constructing something from scratch and more like becoming available to something that was already trying to take shape. The moment of making feels less like creation and more like receiving. Art it feels doesn’t come from the artist but through her.

Different forms of expression create different structures of attention and different modes of knowing. Research in embodied cognition establishes that the body is not merely the executor of the mind’s instructions but a site of creative intelligence in its own right. The photographer knows something about light that the writer doesn’t, built through the specific constraints of frame and unrepeatable moment. The dancer knows something about gravity that the physicist doesn’t, built through thousands of hours of falling and recovering. Each form of expression is not a different medium for the same insight. It is a different way of perceiving, and the perception is the form’s actual knowledge.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow identified the condition in which this knowing arrives most freely. Complete absorption in a matched challenge, where self-consciousness dissolves and action and awareness merge. The block is the opposite end of the same model. Perfectionism arrives before the work does, evaluating the idea against an imagined finished version the actual work will inevitably fail to match. The sufficient first attempt, not the perfect one, is the only way anything ever gets made.

Essays here follow creativity across forms: writing, photography, dance, music, improvisation, the essay as a thinking instrument, the image as an argument. What connects them is not the medium but the orientation. It is a willingness to notice something and then find the form that holds it honestly.

Citations: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Jossey-Bass, 1975. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper and Row, 1990. Ching-Ju Yang, Hsin-Yen Yu, Tzu-Yi Hong, Li-Kai Cheng, Wei-Chi Li, Tzu-Chen Yeh, Li-Fen Chen, and Jen-Chuen Hsieh, “Embodied metacognition as strengthened functional connection between neural correlates of metacognition and dance in dancers,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2024. Anna Griffith, “Embodied creativity in the fine and performing arts,” Journal of Creativity, Volume 31, 2021.