Creativity is an Action

In my conversations with people from many walks of life, I have heard over and over such statements as I’m just not creative or I’m not the creative type, which says more about the judgment these people hold around their own creativity and their isolation from it than the reality of their intrinsic creative nature.

Modernism has deemed creativity as valuable only in its final product, and the creative process – a highly complex and individual undertaking – is regarded as secondary, if not wastefully time-consuming. As it turns out, the right-brain-vs.-left-brain argument is entirely moot, since neuroscience has shown that creativity stimulates an intricate network in locations throughout the brain. The modernist’s love affair with reductionism has infiltrated education, politics and business, relegating creativity to a frivolous hobby, sadly shaping society into a depressed, overworked, medicated citizenry struggling to make sense of its beige, dehydrated world. Creativity is an inborn human quality, as natural to us as breathing, and even a century of industrialism cannot entirely condition it out of us. Creativity links us to our essential impulse for expression and manifestation, for meaning-making. Engaging in creativity is a rebellious act in this time and place – a decision to tap into vision, into color, into rhythm and wholehearted satisfaction that only marginally has to do with the finished product.

In “18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently”, Carolyn Gregoire tells us, “While there’s no ‘typical’ creative type, there are some telltale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people.” Amidst the adversarial environment of capitalist society, creativity must be a deliberate choice, an act of uncommon perception to define the world for oneself.