Developmental Spurts

As many of you are aware, my almost three-year-old daughter is getting speech and occupational therapy for treatment of her autism. We will go weeks working with her therapists and trying to encourage her development with our own efforts outside of the therapy, while seeing barely any perceptible changes in her developmental level. Then just about the time that we really start to worry that maybe her development is stuck, or the therapy isn’t working, she will have a “developmental spurt.” Suddenly it will seem like every time she opens her mouth she is saying a new word, or is constantly doing new things with toys she’s had for a long time. We didn’t change anything we were doing, but for whatever reason the pieces finally fit into place in her head and the development finally took place all at once.

It dawned on me recently that developmental spurts aren’t just for toddlers. They can apply to creative development as well. I am constantly trying to improve the quality of my scrapbooking and creative endeavors, to push my design skills to the next level. I will study design theory and try to apply what I’ve seen to my work. I will acquire new tools to expand my horizons and skills. But despite all those efforts I will go long periods of time feeling like I am stagnating, and even start to wonder if maybe I’ve simply reached the peak of the skills that I am creatively capable of.

And then will come the day when I make a layout that is unlike anything I have made before. A new vision comes together for me and I look at the result and say to myself, “That is the absolute BEST thing that I have ever done!” And then I make another layout, with the same results! I look back at layouts I made just a week or two before and can’t believe that I ever considered submitting them, because they pale in comparison to the new ones I am making. That is a creative developmental spurt.

Sometimes I wish the process of improvement was more gradual. It can be hard to keep plugging away at trying to improve when you aren’t seeing any results from your efforts. But there is something incredibly magical about that “aha!” moment when the results finally come together.

I just wish it happened more often.