I would like to expand a bit on the „dogs and creativity“ topic I briefly touched in one of my recent weekly snippets (blog post in German)
I was reading „Show your work“ by Austin Kleon and he was talking about how to make your creative work seen on social media and in this chapter there was a list of things you shouldn’t show. This list included cats, dogs, sunsets and lunches and ended with focussing on your work instead. When I read about the cats and the dogs I was smiling and frowning at the same time and shared this in the fediverse saying that my dogs played a part in my creative work and that I felt I should include them when talking about my days. Quite a few people agreed and shared stories how their pets contributed to their work. One photographer mentioned that taking pictures of his cats and showing them actually was work and I can’t really disagree with them here.
So, what do my dogs contribute to creativity or to my creative work? My creative work is mainly music, but not only music. Teaching has creative aspects, and so has writing concepts and job descriptions, and trying to figure out the best way of dealing with communication and leadership issues in the workplace. Sometimes I need to take a break and think, or take a break and take off my thinking hat.
Dog walks are brilliant opportunities to get the cobwebs blown off your brain and to just „be“ instead of trying to do or to achieve something. That’s one aspect. Another is that most dogs love to be petted and getting some attention from their human, so whenever I need a distraction, I can spend a bit of time with the dogs and feel better for it.
Of course the work isn’t getting done by spending your day walking around in the neighbourhood or cuddling your pets, but a lot of people tend to forget about taking a break and then don’t get much done during their working hours either.
And I’ve had so many interesting ideas popping up in my head while walking the dogs that I started thinking about taking my small recording device with me to keep those ideas. At the moment, I’m concentrating on actually remembering the thoughts and writing them down when I get home and I find that this also works fine.
I wouldn’t want to post pictures of my dogs as my only content of my social media activitities, of course not, but I don’t want to exclude them either.
If you would like to share your experiences how your pets influence your creativity, I’d be happy to hear from you.