Creativity

Creativity - the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination

My wife recently wrote about Cassie’s artistic ability and creativity (http://memoryloss.blogspot.com/2007/11/artsy-not-i.html). I’d already been thinking abut this for a while, primarily my lack of it. Like her, I wonder where creativity comes from, why some people seem to ooze it and others seem to be practically reading life from a script. Where do I see myself in terms of creativity? Poor.

It seems to me everybody starts out creative. Just watch young kids play and you’ll see it. As you get older, life tries to squeeze it out of you. Kids make fun of those who are different, so conformity rules, except for those who resist it (how the hell do they do that?). Join the business world, where quantitative methods, processes, Six Sigma quality control, endless meetings, and mind-numbing business speak designed to make you sound somewhat smart (debatable) while not actually saying a damn thing concrete and thereby avoiding being held accountable for anything that might go wrong all combine to continue squeezing the creative juices out of you. Add marriage and kids, two of the great joys of my life – don’t get me wrong – but they add other priorities that take precedence and, with so much going on, I find myself falling into various routines.

I hope, though, that the creativity isn’t actually removed, but simply pushed aside, crammed into a corner of the brain, or perhaps sleeping, waiting to be called forth, awakened, put back to use, brought back into the light to flourish. Because there’s lots of ways to be creative, not just writing, painting, acting, or something like that; it could just be evidenced in coming up with something really fun for the kids to do, or creating a new bedtime story from scratch, and while I currently seem incapable of these simple little things, I hope that if I force myself that it’ll start coming easier and, instead of being a chore, an uncomfortable break from the routine, it’ll instead make life more enjoyable overall.