Being Creative Is Not Hard
Posted by shaunoc1 on October 17, 2007
Being creative is not hard. All of the best literature on the subject tells us that by sitting down and starting to work, we somehow set in motion a chain of events that seem to push the creator towards success. Even when in the dullest of mindsets, when there is virtually no material of inspiration being fed into the mind, that same intellect can generate astonishing insights into itself and the reality it creates.
What is difficult is sitting down and starting to write. There is a line of code built into our memory which tells us that exerting yourself towards any long term goal is pointless. It constantly reminds us that at any given time, there is something more enjoyable and less exhausting to do. This could be an intellectual relic; an evolutionary meme that doesn’t really serve us any more today.
In the time of pre-humans, our environment dictated that we should exist on almost a strictly moment-to-moment basis. With a scarcity of even basic essentials like food and heat, we missed no opportunity to partake whenever they were available. As civilization has advanced, those of us lucky enough to live in first world societies have become immersed in the Westernized ideal of constant availability. We always have heat and food. We have absolutely everything we need, in caveman’s terms, to live a happy life.
However, we have also been given a new part of the brain: the neo-frontal cortex. It is the base of higher thinking; rationalization and logic. It has given us the civilization we know and all the technology that has enhanced our lived infinitesimally. And it yearns to express itself, to be involved in creative acts. It demands to feed into the evolution that surrounds it, that has created it. It longs to connect to its roots and push towards the tipping point of conscious change, on a personal and mass level.
It can be numbed by routine and distraction. In that sense, the western world that has thrived on the fuel of creative freedom is itself the worst enemy of creativity; we are totally surrounded by distractions.
On the process of writing a book on a computer, comedian Dave Gorman says:
“My computer is connected to the internet and the internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find everything in the whole wide world ever to be a bit distracting. Surely it’s the curse of the modern world that so many people now work at a computer while the computer also provides the biggest distraction from work ever devised by man.”
We have all but lost the advice that all creative people will impart: that once you have begun to work, the muses will work with you. Of course, all of these modes of communication are only distractions if you view them as such. They can also be the greatest tools for linkage of ideas which is the essence of creativity. As with anything, it simply depends on how you think of them.
