Blogs As Creative Outlets

There are many entertaining workplace blogs. Many of these give disgruntled workers a place to vent and to exercise their creative writing talents. Others offer a fascinating insight into:

• the dilemmas that face GPs in today's NHS (the excellent NHS Blog Doc)
• days in the life of an EMT with the London Ambulance Service
• a remarkable account of a Traffic Warden and how his intervention probably saved a motorist's life
.

Blogging is a new creative outlet for many people. There are blogs that detail life in diverse families. And blogs that provide remarkable accounts of what it is like to live with a terminal illness or a disabling condition. There are audio blogs and video blogs of such remarkable quality that they amount to personal mini-documentaries.

I know a number of people who have learned a lot about their lives from blogging about it. It is like adopting a different perspective and considering aspects of your life that may typically go unconsidered.

Depending on the age-group (and the available resources), imagining that you were going to contribute some written, audio or video blogs entries about your life, is one of the exercises that I use in Happystance workshops. I was recently working with some young carers. Some of the participants were reluctant to join in some of the laughercises. They seemed to be very grave, and quite anxious children: some the self-reports indicated that they were experiencing distressingly little happiness in their lives. However, when I introduced this exercise, the difference in some of the children was remarkable. They enjoyed being the presenter of a mini-documentary about themselves. They came up with a host of ideas about items that interest them.

I’ve run this exercise a number of times and some participants have created a remarkable re-framing of their lives. I don’t know if this is because the exercise allows them to use creative talents that normally lie dormant. Or if the value lies in constructing and describing an insight into their lives that they are willing to share with others. My third option is that the exercise shifts the focus of attention to different aspects of people’s lives, and typically ones that bring them enjoyment or fulfilment rather than distress.

The third option reminds me of Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. [Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe.] And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories.

Blogs can invite us to examine some of the many currents of streams of story in our lives. In the course of this examination, we might create new stories and interests that lead us to realise that, as happiness writer and teacher Robert Holden frequently claims, most of us are already happy, we just don’t know it.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project