Elizabeth Gilbert on Curiosity

What is creative living? I have the simplest definition in the world for creative living. First of all, let me tell you what it isn't. It isn't necessarily being an artist. It isn't necessarily writing screenplays and novels. It isn't necessarily having an Etsy shop. It isn't necessarily doing things with Plaster of Paris or renovating furniture or having a garden. That's— if you want to do that stuff, that's great, that's great, that's great. But that's not what it means to have a creative life. To have a creative life is simply this: a creatively lived life is any life where consistently, routinely, habitually, and constantly you choose the path of curiosity over the path of fear. Not once, not twice, not a few times, but all the times. All the times. Yes. Because you're constantly going to be in these crossroads in your life daily almost where there's a lure of curiosity on this side and there's kind of a roadblock of fear over here saying, take this safer path. I don't know what— I don't know how that one ends. So let's just continue with this. And if you keep going to the right on the fear path instead of going to the left on the curiosity path, your life gets smaller. and heavier, which I know is not what you want or what anybody wants. And I say curiosity more than passion because I think we live in a passion fetishizing society where people are constantly being given this often very unhelpful piece of advice, which is follow your passion, follow your passion, follow your passion. Which is all well and good if you happen to have one, but many of us don't or are between passions or have multiple things that we're interested in. Yeah. Or don't recognize ourselves Yeah. And I think that we often lose our passion in that line or can't access our passion some random Thursday morning when we didn't sleep well the night before and things aren't going very well, right? Here's what you can always access: your curiosity, right? Passion is the big telltale sign that you're