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Have you ever felt like you did something well? That, just for once, your efforts to make something worthwhile had worked, and you’d made something to be proud of? Or at least something that represented what you were striving for in the first place?

I’m not sure if I have or not.

So, I spent a few minutes tonight thinking of my own creative efforts, and taking a mental inventory to see if any of it was worth while. I remembered the poems I wrote in college, the dragon I drew in high school, the painting of my wife walking down the hill at my grandfather’s farm, the section with plumbing for my thesis, the photo of a wooden fish I took with a pin-hole camera, the sketches of trusses I drew in 2010, the few fragments of honesty I’ve written about myself, and that sketch of a unicycle on a tightrope…

And, I’m not sure if I have or not.

But, I think this may be at the heart of every creative person. A desire to make something that stands apart from our own simple and distracting reality, and represents something more universal; a desire to create a physical thing that resonates with others; a desire to leave a mark.

So we take up the pen again, and start to draw again.

But, we’ll probably never know if we’ve left that mark at all.

We’ll probably just keep drawing.

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