Creativity

Creativity is not a quality reserved for artists and musicians. It is everyone’s impulse. It shows up in how you organize your desk, in how you open a jar that won’t open, in the willingness to try something a different way when the old way has stopped working. It is what animates a real conversation between two old friends, or a familiar piece of music when it is finally, actually heard. It is what makes the difference between going through the motions and being genuinely present to what you’re doing.

What interrupts or stymies it is usually internal — even when it began as something external and was taken in over time. Like the idea that there is a right and best way, and no other. The subsequent pressure of judgment that one internalizes until it becomes one’s own. The self-monitoring that calculates the risk before the idea has had room to develop. The habit of refining what is already acceptable rather than venturing something genuinely new. Of course, for people in creative professions, the external pressures are real too — deadlines, performance demands, the requirement to produce at a level that leaves little room for the mess that real creative work requires. But in every case, the main obstacle tends to be a form of fear: that trying won’t be worth the failure, however one first learned to define it.

At a deeper level, creativity is also one of the ways people find to process what is difficult to say directly. Art has always done this. It doesn’t have to be high art — it can be anything that asks a person to bring themselves fully to what they’re making. The question is what gets in the way of that, and what it would take to clear it.

See also: peak performance and
The Value of Silence.