Creativity and Origins

Creativity is an interaction with the internal and external environment, a response to time and place. There is a need to describe, define, and make our reaction real to ourselves and others.

If you accept the notion that all life “as we know it” is made of the same essential elements that somehow come out of one primordial ‘moment’, and you let go for a moment of trying to explain to yourself or anyone else how or if something can be born of nothing, here also lie the origins of creativity.

Once a need to communicate one’s perceptions with others; whether to simply make emotional and intellectual connections that confirm, basically, that others can and do appreciate and share your experience; or in the face of losing everything because your integrity as a being cannot remain intact without responding out loud in some way that may not be accepted in its’ time or at all; even if to simply bear witness instead of moving on, eyes averted, stomach in knots. And yet, it isn’t about right and wrong at the center.

Creativity is also a practical problem-solving approach to the things that impede or defy our needs. An opener for cans, friction to create a spark for the fire, for example.

Widely recognized creativity can lead to joy and sorrow, riches and/or the most brutal of incarcerations, even torture and death. What does it mean that a country, a government is so threatened by a poem, a painting, an invention or expressed opinion? Perhaps institutions, as organisms in their own right need to oppose change.

Newton’s third law:“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This seems relevant but I do not know why. Creativity is more like a sprial of chaos that is anything but chaos.