Guest Author - Susan Alison
Remy the rat at the beginning of the hit movie, ‘Ratatouille’, says about humans: “They don't just survive; they discover, they create.”
I would go one step further and say that without creativity, humans wouldn’t have survived at all. That is, we need to create just as much as we need to eat and drink.
So often articles suggest that ‘giving in to’ your creativity is self-indulgent, thus leading to a feeling of guilt should you create something. Some articles spread the idea that creativity is somehow limited to the select few instead of it being a basic part of what makes up a human being. Weird. These are weird ideas.
We need to be creative or we’ll die - or become zombies. (Zombie = one who looks or behaves like an automaton.)
It’s not always about buying a load of materials, having a separate studio, creating a sculpture or recreating a Roman mosaic up the garden path. Creativity is about how we live our lives every day; how we view the tasks in front of us; how we tackle them differently if we feel we could be more efficient, or if we want to obtain more imaginative results.
Cavewoman didn’t take time off from skinning the mammoth, she didn’t clear the extended family out of the cave in order to create a work of art. Cavewoman got creative when she had the mammoth skin in her hand and was trying to work out how to keep her family warm. She got creative when food was low; she got creative when her family was in danger. Cavewoman got creative to survive.
Some early humans did start to paint the walls of their dwellings, but I don’t think they were deliberately being creative – they were just doing what comes naturally. They were recording their lives, telling picture stories about the things they did to survive, obeying a natural impulse to visualise their thoughts.
Today we get creative when the housekeeping money is running out, when stores in the larder are low, when we’re fed up with the furniture, can’t afford new, and rearrange what we have instead; when we mix and match our clothes to make new outfits; when we make cards and gifts for our loved ones. We get creative when we’re trying to soften someone’s hurt; when we try to explain away sadness; when we try to solve problems and avoid bad feeling; when we try to answer questions constructively; when we daydream.
Sometimes, even after all that, we also paint a picture, arrange some flowers, write a poem.
We must be creative. It is part of us. It’s not something that’s tacked on as an afterthought. It’s there within us and around us and we have to allow it to live. We must stop regarding it as a luxury and see it as the necessity it really is.
We are all creative. We need to be creative. We need to acknowledge this as truth, and in doing so, our creativity will bloom.
Yours creatively
Susan
