I have slowly been making my way through The Healing Journal: Guided Prompts and Inspiration for Life with Illness by Emily Suñez.

This is a book that you don’t read all at once. You “savor the flavor,” as we say in our family. You pay attention to each beautiful illustration and each writing prompt. (I last wrote about The Healing Journal in a December blog post. You can click here to read it.)

The book is much too pretty for me to write in. Instead, I use the statements in the book as prompts for my daily five-minute writing exercise. 

If you’re not familiar with it, my five-minute writing time is exactly what it sounds like. You set a timer and you write for five minutes. That’s it. Sometimes I am surprised by what I write during those five minutes. Something comes out on the paper that astonishes me, delights me, saddens me. 

Sometimes I know those five-minutes were just the beginning of something more to come. I feel as if there is more to explore and so I do. Several of my published personal essays were born from my five-minute writing exercises. But sometimes, the five-minutes were just that. Five minutes that are done and over with, that produced writing I won’t ever return to.

Last week, it was a case of me wanting to further explore what I began in my son’s partially-used composition book from last year that I now use for my five minute exercises. It was this statement:

“I am alive with creativity.”

I am alive with creativity. I write — in some way, shape, or form — each day. Sometimes it’s a blog post, sometimes it’s an article for MomsLA.com, sometimes it’s just my five-minute writing exercise. 

What I realized as my timer counted backwards was that my definition of creativity has changed over time. It has broadened and expanded in ways I didn’t realize, until I answered this prompt.

I surprised myself by listing all the ways I am creative, all the ways I demonstrate my creativity. My garden. The way I display the books on my bookcase. The way I use stickers to decorate the envelopes for the letters I mail to my pen pal. The flowers on my dining table and the candles in my writing room. The earrings and necklace I select to wear each day. 

Many days, lately in particular, it’s easy to think of the glass-half-empty parts of my life — the unsatisfying physical therapy appointments, the prescription medications, the pain that leaves me crying when I step out of the shower. 

But my life is more than that. I am more than that. 

Dear Readers, I’d love to know about your creativity. Tell me about it in the comments!