Life Won't Wait--Create Anyway

The Call to Creativity, Courage, and Living Without Permission

There’s a preciousness to the way we think life ought to unfold, as if we were promised something when we were little children about it all—some great festival, some carnival with ferris wheels and cotton candy.

We step in only when we feel surefooted, participate when we feel most certain, speak up when we think our words carry weight, create only when we believe we have something worth giving.

But life isn’t waiting for our sense of readiness.

It moves like a river swollen with spring rains, carving its way through us whether we lean in or not. The work—the real work—is to wade in anyway, to throw ourselves into the current, to make and speak and live not because we are certain, but because this is what it means to be here.

Life doesn’t ask if you’ve had enough sleep, if your bank account is full, or if the world is kind to you today. Life doesn’t pause so you can catch your breath. It crashes into you, point blank, no warning, no mercy. You either meet it or let it carry you under the waives.

Life does not wait for the right circumstances. It does not ask if you're ready. It's fired at you point blank. There is no pause button. It is messy and unpredictable. Life doesn't ask for permission.

I tell people often—Creativity isn’t some shiny or polished thing, set aside for poets or painters with tortured souls. It’s not a hobby for the lucky or a privilege for the chosen. It’s the response to being alive, as natural as breath, as necessary as hunger. It isn’t optional. It isn’t a luxury. It’s the birthright of anyone with blood in their veins and a pulse that won’t allow them to quit.

And so we create—not because it’s easy, not because it pays, not because anyone is asking us to. We create because the weight of living is too much to carry alone. Because the days are short and the nights are long and somewhere between, we have to find a way to make sense of it all.

It comes like clawing hunger, like thirst, like the sudden need to stand in the rain and remember you’re alive. If you wait for the right moment, for the clean desk, for stillness, you’ll die with your gift, hidden, still inside you.

Creativity does not care if you feel comfortable.

Art is not about convenience.

Creativity is medicine. It’s survival. It's alchemy. It’s taking the sharp edges of the world and turning them into something that speaks. It’s refusing to let the thundering clock of time to erase us without a fight.

If you only create when it feels good, when the world nods in approval, when the path is clear—you aren’t making art. You’re making decoration.

And decoration won’t save you, and it won't save the world.

Create even when it's not convenient.

Especially then.

Convenience has never been the soil from which anything truly necessary grows.

Creation isn’t about ease or waiting for the right conditions—it’s about pressing ink to the page when the weight of the world tells you to stay silent. It’s about shaping something from the wreckage when all you want to do is disappear into it.

In fact—we create our way out of despair.

When the walls close in, when the days feel shapeless, when meaning slips through our fingers like river silt, we make. Not because it fixes everything, but because it keeps us from being swallowed whole. Creation is the rope we throw ourselves, the map we draw as we walk through the dark.

We don’t create because we feel inspired. We create to remember what it means to feel at all.

But what does creativity REALLY mean?

Candidly, it could mean almost anything. Skies the limit. Ask a kindergartner. They know! Let them tell you how a cardboard box isn’t just a box—it’s a spaceship, a castle, a portal to another world begging to be discovered. A scribble isn’t just a scribble; it’s a purple winged dragon mid-flight, a map to buried treasure, the start of a story only they can know. A kindergartner doesn’t ask for permission to create. They don’t wait for the right tools, the perfect conditions, or some grand justification. They just do.

The funny thing is—I’ve never met a 5 year old who wants to be a pencil pusher obsessed with the rise and fall of the stock market, or assessing their savings account waiting for the good life once they retire. No way! They’re all Picasso, or Frida, or the next Fitzgerald (if they only knew such names!). They’re ecstatic to show up to life with authenticity, imagination, and risk.

But then we get wise…then we believe we need to be practical.

We start trading wonder for caution, imagination for achievement. We learn to color inside the lines, to value the "right" answer over the wild, unknown possibilities. We stop building spaceships out of boxes and start building résumés instead.

We believe creativity is for someone else—someone more talented, more daring, more free. We convince ourselves that life is about security, about playing it safe, about waiting for the "right" moment to take a risk. We buy into the myth that creativity is indulgent, that dreaming is childish, that passion should be tempered by reason.

But what if we’re wrong?

What if the kindergartners had it right all along?

What if the real mistake isn’t in being foolish enough to dream—but in being “wise”enough to stop?

What if the good life isn’t something we save for later, but something we create right now, with our own hands, our own hearts, our own beautifully untamed imaginations?

Maybe the secret isn’t in growing up. Maybe it’s in remembering how to play.

That’s the truth of creativity—it’s not about mastery, prestige, or even making sense. It’s about responding to life with whatever is in your hands, however it comes. Joyfully, courageously, clearly.

It’s problem-solving, daydreaming, breaking the rules just to see what happens. It’s rearranging leftovers into a meal, turning a wrong turn into an adventure, seeing a moment of stillness as an invitation instead of emptiness.

Creativity, at its core, is permission. It’s letting yourself experience what is fully—with wonderment and a sense of play. It’s remembering that you, too, once knew how to turn a stick into a sword, a song into a doorway, a quiet afternoon into a world. The sky really is the limit—but only if you remember to look up.

***

A new episode of the Creator’s Podcast just dropped— and I can’t wait for you to hear it.

This one? It’s something special.

I’m talking about Carmen Mondragón, also known as Nahui Olin—Mexican poet, painter, muse, and relentless force of nature. She didn’t just create art—she was art. She blurred the lines between artist and masterpiece, refusing to be boxed in, refusing to live inside a single label or lane.

Her life itself was a defiant act of creativity, a challenge to the idea that we should be just one thing, that we should play it safe, that we should make ourselves small to fit inside the world’s story of who we’re supposed to be.

I’m so excited for you to hear about this brilliant soul—someone who reminds us what it means to fully and fearlesslylive.

And hey—if it moves you, if it stirs something in you, share it. Let the world know you heard something worthwhile. It means more than you know.

Maybe you’re ready.

Not just to think about creativity, not just to dabble in it when the mood strikes—but to claim it. To step fully into the life of a Creator.

I know—you’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even tried before. Maybe you started it, then let it fade. Maybe doubt crept in, or life got in the way. But here’s the thing: the call to create never really leaves you. It waits. And this—right here—might be your invitation to answer it.

That’s why I built The Creators Collective—not just as a resource, but as a home. A space for people like you, who are ready to live fully, to create boldly, to step deeper into their own raw, untamed brilliance.

Every month, I teach LIVE masterclasses, designed not just to spark creativity, but to ignite something bigger—courage, joy, a more fully inhabited life. I craft prompts meant to move you beyond inspiration and into action. And inside our exclusive Creators Chat, you’ll find a community of like-minded souls—sharing their work, their struggles, their triumphs, their artful responses to the chaos and beauty of life.

And it doesn’t stop there. You get access to over two years of teachings, playlists, prompts—everything designed to help you break through, go deeper, and keep going.

This isn’t just a single serving class. It’s not just another online group. This is an invitation—to step into your full being, to say yes to the life that’s been calling you all along.

Hey thanks for being a part of this Tribe. This soul fam. I am so glad you are! Take care this week. And remember, Create Your Self Alive!

Rainier