Creativity is the First…
The American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” I am saying the same about creativity, and I’m casting a wide net in gathering a definition. The creative endeavor may appear to be bravery, studiousness, activism, communication, compassion, or any number of things my limitations prevent me from seeing. But every time someone takes the first step toward something new, the creative process begins. Creativity, although often disregarded as too “touchy-feely” or as a waste of time as grade levels increase and academics drive the curriculum, facilitates the type of divergent thinking that enables problem solving and innovation. And contrary to what standardized tests would have us believe, creativity may be the most essential component of an education preparing students for the exponentially advancing technology driving the job market of which they will soon be a part and in which some will rise to administrative positions.
Creativity in leadership allows an individual to see from perspectives other than one’s own, to imagine circumstances as they could be, to plan for what has never happened before. If positive change is to occur within any leadership position, merely maintaining the status quo is undesirable, but if a leader—in a classroom, a community, or a country—cannot envision circumstances as different from those he or she has experienced, the status quo becomes a certainty. The ability to abstract and hypothesize stem from creativity. While people often associate creativity with childhood and, later, with artistic professions, creativity is the cornerstone for all innovation. A broken system desperately needs creative minds to see new possibilities, especially since in many cases, leaders wrongly believe possibilities have already been exhausted. Too often, people, not possibilities, are exhausted because they frustrate themselves by abiding within traditional limits. Creative thinkers find new approaches, see things differently, and in terms of leadership, make progress even if it is simply to pose a challenge to tired practices. Although it must be accompanied by other qualities conducive to governance, creativity plays a pivotal role in leadership.
In the lower elementary grades, creativity is easy to spot. Learning the alphabet and drawing pictures of items beginning with the letters looks like creativity to many, but as academics become more advanced, the recognition of creativity’s role in cognitive development becomes more difficult to identify. The same principle is, however, at work. In cognitive development, creativity is often about making connections, especially those which are not readily apparent. Creative thinking requires imagination, yet the word imagination is too often limited to its connotation. While some people, upon hearing the word, think of dragons or dress-up or elaborate stories, imagination involves higher order thinking skills which align well to the scientific method: an observation can trigger questions which lead to assumptions or hypotheses. Yet imagination goes further; the curiosity observations trigger can send a child on a quest to know more, to analyze, to take apart toys, remote controls, engines, stories, personalities, social norms, governments. And seeing the pieces can encourage synthesis. Knowing what components fit into what places may cause a child to question if the original is the best way. How can it be better? In this way creativity ushers in skills which can construct not only the foundation of individual identity but of society. Schools must understand that the technological age, as Ken Robbins asserts, does not need workers who can follow directions as much as it needs problem solvers. Creativity lends itself to the development of skills which make a student successful in the classroom and beyond. Creativity is thinking.
Creativity is a means of self-expression, and the very term self-expression offers a nearly self-evident reason that creativity is important in social-emotional development. Creativity allows children to immerse themselves in their own thinking in order to discover their likes, dislikes, and limitations. For example, a child who loves animals may pretend to be a vet and imagine all sorts animals, but through this play, especially if role playing with another child, he or she may discover a dislike for the medical end of the field if the thought of doing more than petting the animals is upsetting. Likewise, older children and adolescents may devise “what if” situations through which they discover social boundaries while talking or gossiping with peers, and in doing so determine social limitations of acceptable behavior. Creative play and conversation allows for discovery with protection from adverse consequences, allowing children to “experiment” with thinking and reactions to situations without actually living—or suffering—through them. Creativity allows for exercises in self-discovery, in peer-compatibility, and in coping. As in the other two areas of focus, creativity in social-emotional development requires abstraction, introspection, reflection, and application. In itself, creativity offers a learning process through which people become more complete by getting outside of themselves and their usual habits of mind.
To be creative means to find new mental pathways, often to existing destinations.
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Creativity is the First…
It’s the first note a baby bird ever chirps, the first language a child speaks, the first mark upon a blank page.
And it’s the bird, the child, and page themselves.
Creativity is the junction of inspiration and action. It’s unconventional reaction.
Creativity does not premeditate itself into inaction.
Creativity is passion. It’s feeling the swirl of the universe reeling in your brain and needing to find a way to express it. It seizes the spirit and finds its portal, its medium.
a Medium—that is what the creative person is—a spiritual medium channeling
the theist’s God, the atheist’s favorable conditions, and the agnostic’s Maybe…
the Whatever-It-Is–That-Results-In-THIS…
This Life, this diversity, intensity, complexity: Extremities: beginning and ending, beginnings from endings, living, dying, being born and born again, seeing cycles, patterns, flows of energy streaming from within and out plunging into streams of consciousness without knowing where they lead
until that white-water of revelation makes it all make sense.
Creativity is a rush.
Creativity is a seized indecision; error turned to art; learning miracles from false-starts: spurned love becomes a song; a wrong turn a destination; an inclination climbs to greater depth, a hunch becomes a universal law: Here’s to that wild bunch who truly saw —Plato, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, Tesla, Einstein, The Brothers Wright—to all who soared long before us and invite us by the example of their flight.
Creativity is passion and innovation; the need to follow propensity, the need to live with intensity, to delight in opportunity rather than be overwhelmed by option, to capture life in a vision from which others can draw their own versions--or aversions.
Creativity is a burden…
of imagination and contemplation
that sends you searching to answer the unanswerable
to see beauty in uncommon places
to follow the traces of evidence that lead only to another paradox--
to another set of locks for which no key was ever forged
Creativity opens doors.
Creativity pours oceans from thimbles and finds the symbols of meaning
where most think not
to look.
It knows you must start to end in no common way. It knows that from whatever clay we’re cast, to set too firmly is death, so creativity awaits that divine breath that says, “Now, begin…”
Creativity makes us last.
