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Confession time: I don’t usually watch the Oscars, for the same reason I don’t usually go to the movies–I have a hard time sitting still and focusing on anything for that long. Sorry. Oh, and there’s a brief spoiler in here, so stop reading…..now.

Still reading? Good. Anyway. This year, I watched a fair amount of it, and one acceptance speech caught my attention. In his speech, Michael Giacchino notes that he was never told that what he was doing was a waste of time, and he recognized that he was lucky to have had parents, friends, colleagues, and so on that encouraged rather than discouraged his aspirations in film and television. He exhorted young people that were watching to listen to him and not to the naysayers around them: what you’re doing is not a waste of time. He was indeed fortunate.

His speech made me think of an annual competition I participate in: National Novel Writers Month (NaNoWriMo). To sum it up, every November, thousands of people sit down and each one attempts to write 50,000 words in 30 days. There is no prize beyond the satisfaction of reaching a goal, no one to compete and triumph against but yourself. It is a creative challenge that gets people to write. People write without judgment or editing or inhibition, with the end goal being the writing, not publishing or perfection. It is, a tagline notes, the end of the “One day…” novelist (as in, “one day, I’ll write a novel.”)

But some people are inherently against it, because there’s no point to it. Why do it, they ask, if the aim is not to be perfect, but just to write? Why write if you don’t create good things? Why write if there’s no prize, no “first place” to be gained, no awards? It sounds, they say, like a big waste of time.

The creative things we do sometimes (or even frequently, depending on your circumstances) do get regarded as a waste of time. I can’t think of anyone I know who hasn’t had to deal with this at some point in their lives. Unfortunately, there’s always going to be someone whose real meaning in life is to be your personal raincloud: Why be creative? There’s no career/money/future in it. You know how hard people have to work to be famous? You don’t have that kind of talent or dedication. You’re wasting your time to produce something no one is going to see/hear/watch/read. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Time.

I have heard it all. And, because you’re here on this particular site and have probably submitted to the journal, I’m betting you’ve heard some permutation of it, too. And it hurts. It’s hard not to get rattled by it. Some part of your brain starts to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they’re right. If it’s bad enough, you might walk away from your creative pursuits.

What’s hard to remember is that creativity has value, even if you are the only person who enjoys it. If you’re working hard to constantly improve yourself and your creativity, that work is not a waste. If you’re following your goals, forget the people who’re telling you that you’re wasting your time. Sure, it may take years to get published, get a gallery show, what have you. If ever. But that time isn’t a waste as long as you’re driven in your passion.

In an analytical world, creativity sometimes gets brushed off as something unimportant, something forgettable or disposable. But creativity makes the analytical possible. It also makes it worth doing. It’d be a boring world without that creative fire to entertain and enthrall. And bettering the world around you, even if it’s just how you’re seeing it, is hardly a waste of time.

I had to take a different route to campus this morning, and I ended up driving past just about every elementary school in Fullerton. During the morning drop-off period, of course, so we crawled along past what felt like miles of minivan caravans and herds of tiny kids with backpacks more suited for Everest than Bastanchury.

There was one vignette that caught my eye, though: a mom towing two kids through the parking lot by the hands, a little blonde boy and his even smaller sister—who was sporting, quite cheerfully, a set of antlers. Bright, neon pink pipe-cleaner antlers, clearly hand-made, just bobbing along with the wind on a Monday morning in March.

And just like that, it was over: the mom towed them into kindergarten and I was out of the crushing traffic. But those antlers… and why not? Why not start a new week, a new month, with new antlers?

It got me thinking of a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos last night. Yeah, I know, not the most intellectual thing out there, but it can’t all be Foucault and Faulkner. It was a toddler, maybe two years old if that, running in circles through automatic doors. In one door, out the other, with this expression of sheer joy—like the doors were opening just for him, and how cool was that? And the natural instinct is to laugh; hey, it’s funny, the little kid finding so much fun with something like automatic doors.

But try and imagine that epiphany moment for a second. What was it like the first time he found this door would do that? Something that’s always been heavy, inaccessible, something that the “big people” could do, now opens just because you’re there? What’s that moment like, that first realization of something new, something that’s so simple, but so expressively, so intuitively joyful? It’s a little painful, I think, to consider that maybe you can’t remember that first truly novel moment. But you know it had to have been there. How fantastic is it to see something truly new? It doesn’t happen much anymore, but when it does, it certainly catches your attention.

We often take those innovations and epiphany moments for granted. Creativity is either side-lined or suppressed in favor of the technical, the analytical, the precise. We have so few opportunities for that kind of realization anymore, and sometimes it becomes easier to plow forward, to neglect them, in favor of doing simply what’s got to be done, and not much else. Sure, there are a lot of reasons for it: papers, exams, article deadlines, you name it. But where’s the creativity anymore? I know a lot of you reading this are creative people—I mean, sure, you stayed for the scintillating blogging, but you probably came for the literary journal—so what’s happened?

Maybe it’s time, at the start of the month, to take a well-deserved breath, and consider the idea of a fresh, creative look at everything. Walk around and see the world like things are actually new to you. Notice the details, even the absurd ones. Take an hour and indulge your creative and innovative side that’s needing a jump start right about now. Have an epiphany moment, if you can draw or invent or write or brainstorm one up. In the midst of your routine chaos, find a little bit of that creative amazement again. The amazement of being new to the world, where it’s all innovation and creativity and pink antlers and that wonderment that, when you approach them, those doors really do open just for you. And it’s pretty damn cool.

It’s easy, as we get further into the semester, to get bogged down with the quotidian. The same routine, the same classes, the same tasks. It’s all routine. Old hat.

So maybe what we need are some new antlers.