I personally believe that “Creativity” is the most over rated word used to evaluate or judge someone. We use it to say that someone is either very creative or not so. It can be said to be sarcastic as well!
I also believe that it is also an over rated talent. Every single one of us is capable of creativity if we define creativity as the act of producing something that did not exist before. One can be very creative just baking a cake, or cooking up a stew or even planting a garden.
There, I have just been very creative with these two paragraphs! I have created something that did not exist before.
Let me, for the purpose of this particular post, restrict creativity to writing. I accept that creativity can cover a whole lot of other activities too, but since all the readers of this blog are also mostly involved with the written word, either in reading or writing, let us take this one particular form of creativity. Please just remember that I use the word blogging to indicate writing for the blogworld.
Way back in June 2008, just when I had started to blog with this blog instead of the social networks, I had written as follows:
“Since long, some of my well-wishers have been urging me to blog. I did blog on some social networks and even had my own blog on a free hosting service for a while. I just could not somehow enjoy doing that kind of blogging. I was finally persuaded, by some very persistent friends to blog seriously and this is the beginning of what I hope will be a long affair with blogging.
In my retirement, I have become quite a prolific writer in the sense that I correspond regularly on the email, offer comments on a number of blogs that I regularly visit and also indulge in a bit of professional writing. Having acquired that kind of experience over the last few years, I believe that the time has come to channel some of my free time into blogging.
George Bernard Shaw had this to say about why he wrote:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
I can well believe that he was quite sincere in this conclusion. The satisfaction of creating something for the sheer joy of creating itself is worth the effort. If in the process, one is able to share one’s thoughts with others via a medium, get feedback and generate some discussions on it, that can only add to the joy. I hope that my belief will stand vindicated in the days to come.”
To a large extent, my belief has been vindicated and I am a very happy blogger indeed. I have made new friends and have established some remarkable online relationships which would not have been possible without the blog nudging me along.
Life was good or so I thought till I came across this passage in a book that I am now reading.
“If we think of the daimonic as man’s struggle with forces from within his own unconscious which, at the same time, are rooted in the objective world, we can understand how this conflict would be brought closer to the surface, made more demanding and available for Jacob, precisely at the moment when his struggle with Esau was imminent. The daimonic is more apt to come out when we are struggling with an inner problem; it is the conflict which brings the unconscious dimensions closer to the surface where they can be tapped. Conflict presupposes some need for a shift, some change in Gestalt, within the person; he struggles for a new life, as it were. This opens up the channels to creativity.
Jacob is the prototype of the religiously creative man; but the same is true for artists and writers. “The need to express one’s self in writing,” Andre Maurois tells us, “springs from a maladjustment to life, or from an inner conflict, which the man cannot resolve in action.” No writer writes out of his having found the answer to the problem; he writes rather out of his having the problem and wanting a solution. The solution consists not of a resolution. It consists of the deeper and wider dimension of consciousness to which, the writer is carried by virtue of his wrestling with the problem. We create out of a problem; the writer and the artist are not presenting answers but creating as an experience of something in themselves trying to work – “to seek, to find and not to yield.” The contribution which is given to the world by the painting or the book is the process of the search.”
Love & Will – Rollo May.
Phew!
So, I am now maladjusted to life! My writing, as of all those bloggers who are on my Bookmarks, is an expression of the search within to find resolution to conflicts. Our creativity is the process of the search!
In simpler words, I understand Rollo May and Andre Maurois to mean that I am actually nuts and instead of going in for therapy with a Shrink, I blog to find release!
I of course am aware, that some of my readers will gleefully agree with my understanding. I do not have to name them, as I am sure that all of you know who they are anyway.
So, for those others, who may be open minded and also are writers, what do you think? I would particularly be interested in hearing from Jody and Looney.
