Creativity

Creativity is the culmination of imagination and dreaming. Thoughts and ideas, inspirations and aspiration that are gradually disseminated and sifted through the sum total of our life’s experiences and emotions. They are then paper macheted back together in a kaleidoscope of solutions possessing varying degrees of aesthetic and practical functions.

Creativity Is For Everybody

Creativity is at the heart of every artist, businessman, politician, doctor and school teacher. Our creativity becomes the fabric of our identity. It is the tapestry of our constructed world in which we all belong. Without it, we see endless robots full of function but with no colour, life or beauty. They become identical, mundane and predictable. They are safe but progress grinds to a holt and relationships become something of a decadent fantasy, seen as trivial and unworthy of our precious time and attention.

Creative Blocks

Today creativity is being replaced by the endless consumption of prefabricated stories streamed through Netflix, ABC kids and YouTube. Kids no longer read or listen to stories.  These valuable pass times actively strength and enliven our imaginations. Old-fashioned stories told through plain text on a page are like colouring in books. They provide guidelines but your mind is the pallet which breathes texture, detail and depth into each page. To read is to cultivate your imagination.

Learning and education have evolved into a mass production line. Instead of engaging the brilliant and impressionable minds of the worlds finest it reproduces identically copies of everything that has come before. Unfortunately, everything that came has left this generation an inheritance of insurmountable problems. Global warming, poverty, racism, gender discrimination and cancer, will not be solved using the thinking paradigms of yesterday.

Even our most passionate teachers are bound to our inescapable system of conformity. Funding requires students to accurately reproduce perfectly structure sentences, sums, facts and fingers. Any creative deviation from the approved curriculum [even when lead by the interests of students] is squandered and labelled as incorrect and irrelevant. Success is defined by a comparative mark. The requirement that everything is neatly and precisely categorised as right or wrong places black and white glasses over the multicoloured minds of children.

Comparison and competition are the archenemies of the creative mind. They necessitate that individuals be the same as everybody else only better. Uniqueness, which forms the bedrock of creativity is slowly euthanised be the insatiable human desire for acceptance and belonging. And yet paradoxically participation in music, theatre and dance unite individuals together into a community of artistic diversity held together by a common goal.

Choosing To Be Creative

A creative practice that is not cultivated, nurtured and breathed into life becomes like the smouldering embers of a dying fire. There is still potential but without the perfect environment, the heat vanishes and potential dwindles into a pile ash. It is white, black and grey. Statistically speaking for the dwindling embers to encounter dried bracken and the whisper of a breath is ten to one, one-hundred to one, one-thousand to one, one million to one. The exact number we do not know but given the current state of our once idealistic world, the numbers can’t be good.

Creativity has to be deliberately chosen and carefully allotted a place of priority in our increasingly busy lives. We create for the sake of creating, for other people, for education and for ourselves. It cannot be left to the whim of chance. It is too important, necessary and essential to be gambled away. Creativity won’t grow and flourish unless you plant it into your schedule and nurture it with the resources that it is dependent on in order to thrive.