Sculpt your own story

By Ranjan Yumnam *

We all are artists and our lives are the stories that we write daily. You are the main character in your life's story. You are its director, the protagonist and the script-writer. Through choices we make daily, we change the flow and direction of this story called life. We choose the secondary characters by way of friends and relationships we forge and sometimes replace them if they do not gel with the desired script of our life.

There are many narratives of it; your story may be different from the book of your life that others are reading. So what, it's your life; your story. You are the king, queen and prince all rolled into one. You hold the copyright and if people like your tale, fine. If not, who cares? It's your story. Take it or leave it.

However, I feel most of us do not write our running autobiography well enough. We drift with the flow of the crowd. We do not live the life we want; we are more concerned with what other people might think of what we are doing, loving, playing and eating. The enormous power we have at our disposal to make our own choices is thwarted at the hands of populism and our need to conform to the dominant narrative. We end up leading mundane lives; even the choices we make are routine chosen to fit the status quo, the tedium of meaningless stability.

The import of this lazy existence is that we have become mindless consumers and have forgotten to be creators. Just think for a moment how parasitic we are as consumers from the minute we wake up from bed in the morning to the second we hit the sack in the night. We listen to music created by others, watch movies directed by others, enjoy images taken by others, read books written by others, eat food cooked by others, build houses designed by others, do things thrust upon us by others, and even love people approved by others. And we thought we were the captains of our souls and master of our faith; what non-sense!

The way to regain control of our lives is to consume less and create more. We have sold our souls to devils of consumerism. The couch has become our favourite place on earth and has taken away the precious time from us to create and make choices that are truly our own. We need not be geniuses like Mozart or William Shakespeare to be creative.

Just like a dew drop in our backyard garden is sometimes more beautiful than the vast sea of the Caribbean's, our imperfect verse that emanates from our wobbly heart is a masterpiece to the person who matters to us. Or compose a music score for your daughter's birthday with lyrics that you and your loved ones will relate to; trust me, it will be better than the chartbusters of Taylor Swift to their ears.

Do anything to create something: run up the hill and leave your footprints and take pictures of them when you come downhill. Spray a graffiti on your garage. Write a recipe and try it out even as you edit it. If you have the eye and hand coordination for sculpture, bring it on, just do it.

To be creative, it's important that we stop being prisoners of routine. We need ideas: new, crazy, impractical, utopian, anything, but we need them. The difference between a visionary and an ordinary person is that the visionaries not only do routine tasks; they also at the same time dream up plans that do not seem urgent at the moment but which will culminate into a masterpiece if executed. The visionary sees the big picture. The ordinary leader merely concentrates on what seems urgent at the moment, to make things just go by—neither creating anything new, nor shaking up the tree.

Our society would not stagnate like this morass that it has become if everyone of us, at the individual level, tries to create something new and not just being a passive consumer. The richest and the most productive society is the one in which its people are innovative and brimming with ideas. United States holds the record for producing the highest number of Nobel Prize winners, and it is no coincidence that it is also the most powerful and the wealthiest.

Let's not just consume, let's also create things, ideas and products that will give us satisfaction and stimulate further innovation. To be creative, you need solitude. For inspiration, you need participation and engagement in the surrounding—to go out and be there in the thick of it, meet someone who smells nice, anybody, anything that can give you the much needed spark to let your creative juice flowing. Once you get the inspiration, you need to be alone to organise your ideas and implement them and give it the imprint of your heart.

Perhaps, we need a platform where great ideas can be shared and appreciated. It may be that we have unsung geniuses loafing about everywhere among our midst without an opportunity to showcase them. I invite suggestions for establishing a voluntary group which can organise TED like seminars and talks in Manipur, for which I am ready to lend my energy, time and ideas.

Please let me know if anyone is interested in making this happen. The fact is, life is short and there is not enough time to write the story about our life. Take up the brush and dust off the canvas that has been lying in the corner. Put colours into your life and show them to the world. Do some amazing things. Be the hero yourself, not the hero-worshipper who fights at the theatre counter to get a ticket.

Discover your creative Mojo, now.



(Views expressed are personal and do not represent official position)

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was posted on May 10, 2011.