During our six plus weeks in California, I nearly filled up my sketchpad. Sketching is what I do when I travel—and I love it.

My travel sketching materials are portable—a small sketchpad, good quality watercolor pencils, and a brush that has water inside it. To create a sketch, all I need are my little bag of supplies, a good view and a bench (or rock) to sit on.

Creativity is also a core part of my life at home.  I paint upside-down, inside-out, and backwards on handblown glass, using large tubes of acrylics and other supplies on my work bench.

I’ve been asking myself—why is creativity so important to me? More specifically, is it the product or the process? This is both a philosophical and pragmatic issue, maybe especially now that I’m old.

Like all my artist friends, I have a large accumulation of art that I’ve created.  I’ve sold a lot of art—especially my glass art pieces. But even so, my home is filled with my art. My travel sketches are small. But I’ve traveled a lot; so, I have piles of sketchpads with colorful sketches from our travels—Asia, Europe, America…  I don’t really exhibit the sketches from my sketchpad—mostly they sit in a closet.

So maybe—what’s important is the process—that is, what gives meaning is the experience of creating art.

But that’s not quite right. I care about the art—is it good? Or not? I’m happier if I’m satisfied with how it turns out—so maybe the product is important too, even if I don’t plan to exhibit these travel sketches.

But still, there’s a conundrum. What to do with all these products of creativity? I’ve downsized once—maybe I’ll downsize again. And, in any case, if I keep creating—what will I do with all the products of my creative life?

A few years ago, after there was a flood in the basement, I had an art give away. I laid out art on the back porch and invited folks to come on a Sunday afternoon. In about 45 minutes, I had given away almost 300 pieces of art—all of it stuff that had been sitting in the basement.  Since then, a number of people have told me how much they are enjoying the art they picked up on that afternoon.

Maybe the way to think about the stuff we create, is that we don’t really own it. The stuff we create lives with us for a while. No thing is permanent. The experience of creation also is ephemeral—it happens in a series of moments. If the process and the product give joy—that’s enough.