I love the new year as it always brings with it a renewed feeling of motivation to reset our unwanted habits and patterns and try again to improve in the areas we’ve set goals for. It’s a chance to get your health back on track by increasing physical activity, eating healthier or drinking less. For some, dry January seems to be a big enterprise these days as it does this very thing – resets or detox’s the body for a clean start to the new year. Feeling better health wise can inspire us to improve in other areas of our life as well. I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she describes the new year as a time for adjusting her relationship with food and alcohol. However you label it, a new year is the catalyst most of us will use – for a while anyway. This can also be a time when people reflect on their lives, not just with health or fitness goals but with checking inward – am I happy with how my life is, if not what am I meant to do with my life or what’s my purpose? We tend to look for meaning during this time of reflection. Last year I came to the realization that my purpose is simply my journey and I needed to take ownership of how I conduct myself along the way and who I impact and inspire. Caroline Myss says, “if you have life, you have purpose.” I know that since I started being intentional with creating life on my terms and not just being on autopilot, I have felt more fulfillment and happiness. I’ve used creativity to help me uncover some of my gifts and use them to fill the gap of emptiness I felt at times. The more I get creative in life, the more meaning there is for me and the more excited and hopeful I am about possibilities in the world around me. If this works for me, why not for others? – I thought I would start a conversation here and see what it may trigger out into the online world.
What is creativity?
Creativity unblocks old patterns or habits of thinking. It enables empathy and connects us to ourselves. It nurtures confidence, instills curiosity and in the essence of this article, it stimulates and motives us. Mindful creativity allows us to see the hidden patterns, make connections between things that aren’t normally related, and come up with new ideas. Creativity opens the mind and allows us to view and solve problems more openly and with innovations. Creativity broadens our perspectives and can help us overcome prejudices. It builds intercultural connections and brings together different cultures and sub-cultures. It engages the mind, enables alternative ways of thinking. With all that is going on in the world with how divided our nation has become and all the upheaval and tensions going on around the world, we could all use some creativity in our lives.
It supports positivity which then leads to the desire to be happy and want to help others. It connects us with our passions. It can be as simple as an idea to solve some problem we have going on or it could be a way to illicit ideas of filling a need to want to give back in the world to get involved or volunteer in some sort of charity or organization. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the book “Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention,” defines it as this, “Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives…most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity… and when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”
Creativity is a skill that can be nurtured and developed. We are all born creative and over time, it is conditioned out of us because there may not have been a supportive environment for that growing up. Studies have been done on children using George Land’s Creativity Test which shows they are creative geniuses. A group of 1600 children aged 5 had their creativity tested using this and 98% were deemed creative geniuses, thinking in novel ways similar to the likes of Picasso, Mozart, Einstein and other creative personalities. These same children were tested again at the age of 10 and the level of creativity dropped by 30%. They were then tested at the age of 15 and it had declined down to an astonishing 12%. This same test was given to 280,000 adults and found that only 2 percent were creative geniuses. If you consider yourself not very creative now as an adult, there’s positive news, you can reteach yourself!
So how do we cultivate creativity and get that ability back?
According to one study, 72% of people have creative insights in the shower. Why? Solitary activities like showering, walking alone and daydreaming get the brain moving towards a more creative place. I have become very intentional when I go for a walk and have conditioned myself to use that as one of my inspirational tools. I take my phone with me so that when creativity sparks with an idea or a way out of a problem I have going on, I do a quick recording while I continue to walk so, I don’t forget these inspirational thoughts and then listen back when I am home. I then jot it all down to put the plan of action in place for whatever the idea was for – following through is key. These moments of inspiration can leave us as quick as they came because we have such busy lives we get distracted and poof they are gone. I also listen to audiobooks and podcasts to get my creativity flowing. I recently listened to the audiobook of Will Smith’s Memoir and Matthew McConaughey’s book “GreenLights”, and I found with listening to their very distinct voices telling their own journey using creativity to shape their life was so inspiring to me – it really supports me in my endeavors of writing that book that’s been sitting in my heart for so long waiting to be written. Because I have the goal to complete this book, each week I intentionally use these tools of inspiration to chip away at it. I also find that when I’m in that flow of creativity for writing, it opens me up to see through the cobwebs of problems I need solutions for and brings ideas to ease the worry and stress. We all get inspiration from somewhere it could be books, movies or music but once you understand where that is for yourself, you can start to be intentional with it to get results in any area of your life.
Creativity can come from so many different places. After all you just need to take a walk in nature and see the beauty of creation to be inspired, it’s all around us if you are looking for it. I think just being mindful of the fact that you want to be more creative in your life will allow that focus to open your mind to help you achieve more. You need to be mindful and cultivate it with daily practice. I was recently inspired by an episode I watched on YouTube with Sir Bob Geldof. I don’t know much about him other than he was the one to bring Live Aid to millions of people around the world back in 1985 and was knighted for it by the Queen. I also remember his one hit wonder song from when I was a teenager – “I don’t like Monday’s” by the Boomtown Rats. This song really resonated with my mood when it first came out as I was meandering and weaving my way around in what can only be described as the awkward teenage years of my life. This episode piqued my interest and as I listened to his story of where the inspiration came for that song, I realized that creativity could come from anywhere even from sad and tragic events. Geldof was touring in the U.S in 1978 and he had heard on the news of a school shooting. There was a girl in San Diego who lived across the street from where she attended junior high school and was caught by police shooting her classmates outside her window as they walked on the sidewalk to school. He goes on to talk about how back then school shootings were extremely common.
Geldof goes on to say that in this particular news segment, the reporter talked about how he called up this schoolgirl and asked why she was shooting her mates and her reply was, “I don’t like Monday’s really, does there need to be a reason?” As a side note, my curious mind had to look into school shootings as I hadn’t thought they were that common back in the 70’s let alone now. According to the Statista website, in K-12 schools in the U.S., there were 163 school shootings, from 1970-1979 and each decade it increased right up to 2010-2019 where 426 were recorded – a 33% increase. The NRA (National Rifle Association) has become the most powerful special interest lobby group in the U.S with a budget to influence members of Congress and because of this, many shootings are not reported or in the news so as to not draw negative attention to current guns laws. After reading this, my mind was racing, and it really brought emotions up for me and I jotted down some thoughts for a future article that has nothing to do with school shootings. The mind works in mysterious ways really.
Geldof’s story continued with him having previously read on the plane ride over to the states about this guy called Bill Gates. Now you have to remember, this was 1978 and computers weren’t a thing yet. The article was in the airline magazine found in the front of his seat and Gates who was telling the readers that they were close to putting memory on a silicon chip for what would one day be a personal computer in everyone’s home. Knowing the context of when this article was written, many people didn’t believe this nor did they understand how years later, it would change the world. Geldof thought about what he read and was interested in how they were putting memory like the brain onto a piece of sand like silica and that’s where the future was going. Then after his trip to the states and hearing about these rampant school shootings happening, his brain just started putting it all together based on patterns of experience and thinking and then in pops a line from the poet William Blake, “to see a universe in a grain of sand”, and then he thought we are there – they are putting a universe into a grain of sand and then there was this girl in San Diego killing her classmates and he scribbled the sentence, “the silicon chip inside her head got switched to overload” and the rest of the song followed from there. His creativity was in the zone or the flow as Jay Z likes to call it.
This whole story fascinated me because it was showing me how the creative process can work and can be similar for others with bits of information you hear while out and about just living life. It’s opportunities like this that can spark problem solving creative juices to flow and make change in our lives which can then change someone else’s! After I heard this story, I was amazed at how something so tragic could spark creativity. And then I remembered that almost every country song I’ve ever heard was written out of sadness, tragedy and heartbreak whether that’s directly related to the artist or just something they have heard. Picasso created many paintings in what would be known as the “Blue Period” inspired by a friend’s suicide. Emotions are a huge facilitator in the creative process. Those emotions can be on the spectrum of sadness & melancholy or the other end with joy and happiness. Bringing creativity down to an everyday level was a new concept for me and the more I thought about this, the more it opened me up to the understanding of how to use creativity to be the architect for my life and to create it on my terms. When you think about it, every invention was inspired out of a need for something, and it makes sense to apply this same logic for finding a solution for every problem.
In Will Smith’s Memoir, he talks about one of the most influential books he ever read – The Alchemist. He says it spoke to his soul and it penetrated him and transformed his way of seeing and being. This inspired his dreamer spirit and validated his suffering and his hidden treasure that was buried under the Hollywood sign. Smith puts it like this, “An alchemist is a spiritual chemist, a master of transmutation. The great feat of an alchemist is they can do the impossible. They can turn lead into gold. This concept erupted in my mind, the ability to take anything that life gives you and turn it into gold.” I like this parable as it shows us that we are all alchemist in our own right, and we can all get inspired to create a life legacy starting now to be proud and not worry about sitting in a rocking chair in our 80’s or on our death bed wishing we had left something of value behind. We can start at any age to be inspired and create opportunities of character that we will be remembered by.
We all have this creativity inside us to be used in our own unique way. We don’t need to just use creativity to write, sing, act or paint in the traditional sense we might associate with creativity but in our everyday life to improve it. The artists I’ve mentioned here are no different in this ability but what is different, is they found an outlet for it or followed through with expressing it – put action to it. I don’t believe we all need to express it this way and to be a famous artist to be creative in our lives. We can do it to inspire a loved one, or someone who’s ill or a friend or stranger who needs a pick me up with humour or other ways people use their creativity abilities. Research shows that humour can help people be more creative in problem solving. The hallmark of really effective brainstorming is an abundance of genuine and heartfelt laughter and while you may not be able to solve someone else’s problems for them, you can support them by getting them in a space to be creative through laughter and they can have moments of greater inspiration for themselves. The main thing is that we are using these creative gifts that we were each blessed with to uplift others spirits to then uplift ours.
Bringing purpose and creativity together helps provide intrinsic motivation and sustains creativity in the long run. Creativity supports a healthier lifestyle and longevity. It brings colour where there isn’t any. I listened to an interview Oprah did with Charles Eisenstein who writes a lot of books around the history of human civilization, economics, spirituality and the ecology movement. In this interview he talks about society and how we have isolated ourselves from our communities. For example, most people don’t know their neighbors or are involved in their communities. Eisenstein says, “Our sense of being in the world is based on relationships (other than family) and when we isolate ourselves from people, we aren’t participating in the world in a natural way. We don’t know who we are. There is a deficit of identity when we are shrunk down into these little souls and as a result, there’s low level suffering and a feeling of disconnection from communities. On some level we know better and when we isolate for long periods of time, we express it indirectly as covert and overt rebellion with addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue and depression. These are all ways we withhold our full participation in the program of life that we are offered. We are not a separate self; we are the totality of our relationships.” I think about this and what I read recently that a society who has lost touch with its creative side is an imprisoned society, in that generations of people may be closed minded. This really moves me to be more creative within my relationships and community and to use my creative abilities to add value to others where I can.
I wanted to introduce the idea or at least remind others of bringing more creativity into everyday life if only to plant a seed and bring reflection to the idea in hopes people will be more intentional with it. I feel we all need to be creative in our lives especially with the upside-down world we live in now with so many unknowns. Whether that’s to motivate ourselves to be better in an area we want to improve or do more or to uplift and inspire those around us and as Eisenstein says, “to participate in the program of life.” We owe it to ourselves and to the world we live in to be inspired and create. With 2022 being a new year, what do you need to do to break through to be the real you? Where can you be more creative in this? The world needs more of you, let your light shine and who knows where that can go!
“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue these” – Michael Nolan