Art can be a medium for helping us explore our thoughts and ideas as we make the transition through midlife. Also, as we become more appreciative of the world we inhabit, we become better at noticing things around us. As a result we become better at capturing what we see on paper, even if our results are never destined to hang in a gallery.

As with so many skills, you may have had a bad experience in art classes at school and believe you aren’t at all creative. Don’t worry, you can have great fun creating your way to understanding what you want from life now without being able to draw a shadow, create perspective or blend colors from opposite sides of the color wheel!

The idea is to find ways to tap into your talents and unfulfilled desires. Look for projects that require you only to tear and cut things out of magazines, arrange them in a way that appeals to you, and to occasionally to color in blocks of text. Now that doesn’t sound difficult, does it?

The bottom line is that you create things for your own enrichment and pleasure. There is no requirement that you share your work or have it critiqued. I suggest that you carefully pick who you share your finished work with if you have lingering feelings of doubt about your skills!

Creating projects is about rediscovering yourself, and letting the lost pleasures from your earlier life back into your life. It is also about thinking what you want to get from the rest of your life, and using images to visualize where you want your life to go. In addition to common sense and intuition that probably tell you this, there has been research carried out that found that if you know what you are looking for you’re more likely to find it.

Sometimes we also want guidance, reassurance that our gut feeling is what we should go with. Art of the sort I’ve described can offer this support – and can also simply provided us with objects we have created that we like to look at.

However you feel about art, approach these projects with an open mind and see what you find. For more ideas visit Midlife Creativity.