Creative Living

For many, the word 'creative' is thought to be the preserve of painters, playwrights, musicians, composers  and other artistic practitioners.
Four Mondays ago, a young and inexperienced businessman, not long at his job, and new to the urgencies of keeping payments, loans and other demands up to date, wondered how he was going to pay the wages to his staff of five on the following Friday.
By Thursday afternoon he had the wages sorted for the next three months, rent, rates and looming electricity bill, all due in the very near future, covered, and enough money to live on as well. 
Now, there's creativity for you.

His next immediate plan was to organise himself and his activities into a cohesive force that used the same urgency, the same focus, and the same continuous application to refine what he'd done in the crisis. His focus was on the activity, not just the planning.
While aware of the necessity to plan, he was now aware of the equal necessity to act on the plan. That's where he'd fallen behind before; he'd planned meticulously, thought his way through the possible challenges, figured out strategies in the face of obstacles, and then sat on the plan as it gathered the dust of inaction in his memory.
Creativity isn't always about divine inspiration, flashes of insight, inspired motivation. Mostly, it's about doing. It's about starting to act on an idea, a hunch, a detailed plan. But it's the starting that matters. Once the plan of action is in place, it's a matter of doing it. Once we start doing it, we deal with the obstacles and diversions just as we do on any journey. And even though the route can be sometimes diversified, we get there eventually. Which is better any day than waiting for the plan of perfection to express itself into our lives.
If we don't start, we can end up waiting for the right time, the right feeling, the right day of the week. And of course all these things can be relevant. But once they have been reasonably assessed, then it's time to move, to do, to get started.

In the realm of people getting fit, preserving their health, helping themselves become the best version of themselves, I see this a lot. Some people will examine their options, decide what they need to do, what they should be doing, for themselves and their lives, and immediately come up with the most persuasive of reasons why the time isn't right, why the course won't work for them, why they will do it sometime.
But not now.
And the moment is gone. The opportunity to begin the journey, start the process, slips by. 
The ideas, the incredible benefits, the  unquestionable advantages of a more fit body, a more alert mind, and a more sound sense of being well, not just physically fit, but universally well, get lost in the tide of good intentions. 
"What You Can Do, or Dream You Can, Begin It; Boldness Has Genius, Power, and Magic in It".
Wolfgang Von Goethe, German playwright.