Every human being is born with the ability to be creative, but to use this faculty it calls for a lot of hard work on his or her part. Creativity is work that goes somewhere, it is a sustained effort towards an ideal.
It may not be given to one to build a dam like Visweswarayya or write verses like Rabindranath Tagore or make a scientific contribution like Ramanujam, but if he would live his life deeply and creatively he must work and go on working to show his own view of what it means to be alive. The work itself may be modest, but if it calls forth delight, curiosity, inventiveness, he is using the same forces that a genius uses. Creativity is not so much an aptitude as an attitude, and therefore applicable anywhere from making a bowl of soup to building a rocket that can land on the moon. Those people we call talented know this by instinct. The rest of us have to learn it.
Perhaps, most often creativity begins in response to things greater than us. It has to be triggered and stirred into acting by a sight or by a word that we hear or read or sense by touch. Beyond such stirring comes reflection, an awareness taking note of our own thoughts. On the heels of awareness is the impulse to do something with what we feel and know. This is the stage where most of us begin to falter and stall. Making and doing turn to be so difficult that we abandon the attempt.
Just because an idea or plan does not take shape, we conclude that it is no good, that we are not creative any way, when, in fact, it takes an enlightened stubbornness to produce anything. Some people insist that they have no ideas at all, when what they mean is that they do not have big or original ideas. But good ideas stream through our consciousness every day when we meet people, travel, read and observe others in action. We can have more ideas by being hospitable to those we have; using them, trying them out, and not discarding them before we have given them a chance.
Some people sprout ideas like mushrooms but let the vision drift away because they are impatient with small beginnings. If they cannot start impressively, they choose not to start at all. This is deadly to creativity. Beyond the longing to do or make something to give our feeling form and substance comes the rough work of discipline. It is more truly in the small, daily moment-by-moment discipline that creativity can be seen than in the crowning triumph.
For creativity to emerge and blossom forth it means choosing from the multitude of possibilities a certain goal and then working patiently toward it, even when we are tired, puzzled or afraid. It means loving what we do, not just it’s high points but it’s day-in-day-out effort. It means sticking to one’s purpose through a thousand storms and fires, from within as well as from without and experimenting, failing, trying again until both the purpose and one’s own self are refined and ready.
The great and transforming truth is that being creative is a discovery of ourselves, of our own way of responding to life.
