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Walls, Windows & Doors: a metaphor for creativity |
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Three ordinary features define every space we inhabit: walls, windows, and doors. Together, they offer a profound metaphor for how we create. In creative life, we construct walls constantly: the disciplines and boundaries that shape our practice. Walls are technique, craft, and constraint. They are the daily practice that builds skill, the genre conventions that provide structure, the deadlines that force completion. An artist who cannot build walls creates without foundation, chasing every impulse, never developing mastery. Yet walls built too high become creative prisons, trapping us in rigid rules, stifling experimentation, cutting us off from spontaneity and risk. The question is never whether to have walls, but rather: which walls strengthen our craft, and which merely confine our imagination? Windows are walls made permeable. They allow influence to enter while protecting our own vision, offering views of other artists' work while keeping us grounded in our unique perspective. Windows represent observation: our ability to see beyond our immediate practice without abandoning it entirely. They are curiosity, study, and inspiration drawn from the world around us. But windows, like influence, can be deceptive. What we see through them is always framed, always partial. Some artists spend their lives staring through windows at others' success, comparing endlessly, never doing their own work. Walls divide. Windows connect. Doors do both. A door is a paradox: simultaneously a barrier and a passageway, an ending and a beginning. In creative life, doors are the courageous decisions that change everything: starting the project, sharing our work, trying the new medium, taking the risk that terrifies us. The hardest truth about doors is that walking through one means leaving something behind: comfort, certainty, perhaps even the artist we used to be. We cannot stand perpetually in doorways; eventually, we must choose. Yet there is profound freedom in knowing that doors exist. Even locked doors suggest that keys might be found. The artist who sees only walls believes themselves blocked. The artist who notices doors knows that creative breakthrough remains perpetually available. We need all three: walls strong enough to build mastery, windows large enough to let in inspiration, and doors we're brave enough to open. The art of creation is the art of knowing which is which, and when to practice, when to observe, and when to finally make the leap. |
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