We had a bit of a fun discussion at my book club today around creativity and what it is. I think it’s so much a part of us that we often don’t even recognize it. We think of art and music and poetry as creative but that is such a small part of the creativity that humans express every single day.
I wonder how I might be creative here and now? Actually, the very act of writing is creative. Taking ideas and giving them form is creativity in action. We have a lot of creative ideas about who and what we are, what life is about, why things are as they are because we’re making that stuff up all the time. Given that we all have slightly, or grossly, different concepts around those ideas, it seems to me that our imaginations are as much a part of the answers we come up with as any real facts. Are there any facts about those existential questions? There don’t seem to be, we get to make it up! That is way cool!
What’s coolest about us and our creative nature is that nothing is static. Ideas about who and what we are, what life is about, etc. seem to keep evolving and shifting and changing. I certainly see all those things very differently than I did in my early years. I may not have been consciously asking the questions, but I did live by certain ideas that I may have inherited or made up, but I lived as though they were true. That’s pretty creative, isn’t it?
We may angst over those existential questions at times but in the end, there is no one answer and no one way to live. We are creative beings always finding new ways to express old ideas and new. Why not make up stuff that’s fun and loving and rich and joyful? We have the ability to do that!
Namaste
