I remember waking up as a child and feeling the sheer excitement of what was waiting outside for me. There were so many things to do, and see, and destroy and build again, and throw, and feel and eat, and put in my hair and find and lose and set on fire. There was never enough time, and there were never any self-imposed limits. It was all about playing and trying and being.

Watch a child painting and you will see it again. Hands, fingers, hair, and paint everywhere, random colours, mixed up with glue, a riot of creativity and an explosion of everything else in sight.

A child writing will produce similar results, ghosts next to soldiers fighting dragons and monkeys and dinosaurs, and in the midst of all this real thoughts and feelings about everything they see and experience.

At what point do we lose this spontaneity and begin to block ourselves with judgements and understandings and rules and regulations?

For some it’s our first contact with education, being told that there is a right and a wrong way to do things, and consequences to not ‘getting it right’.

For others the discomfort and anxiety of adolescence tempers our tendency to explore and experiment, and leads us to hide behind what is accepted (even if that ‘accepted identity’ claims to be experimental and revolutionary).

For many of us it’s the shock of commercialism hitting our creative dreams and ambitions as we venture into the world of work, and the fact that suddenly we aren’t just creating, we need to make money too (and you’ll never do that if you don’t stop playing).

Whatever it may have been for you, there is something to learn from the child in all of us, and (at risk of causing uproar amongst the Star Wars fans reading this), to completely misquote Yoda: when we play with our creativity “there is no do, only try”.

Next time you feel a creative block approaching, try asking yourself these questions:

For me the lesson came from the awareness that I need to create a delicate balance between the playful and childlike side to my personality, and the powerful woman who, when I am fully myself, comes to the fore. Both of these elements are fully me, and being able to dance between them I’m finding the world is a far more exciting and magical place.

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"The opposite of creativity is cynicism." Esa Saarinen

"Curiosity has its own reason for existing." Albert Einstein.

Reading this for me was part of stepping back into my childlike engagement with the world. Ostensibly a children’s fantasy, the story leaps through multiple worlds past armoured bears, angels and witches, picking up a bit of chaos theory, quantum physics and experimental theology along the way. Utterly magical, and it was a wonderful feeling curling up under the covers at 3am unable to put it down!