Are
you officially not a creative type either ?
“Of all human activities, creativity comes
closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it
full-blast living.”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
- leading researcher on positive
psychology
As a child, it is normal to just play and enjoy
being and doing
without time and result obligations, to just experiment. Then
we enroll into school, and our round way of thinking is adjusted into the structure and conformity.
I am convinced that by doing creative activity, life gets a wider perspective and is less restricted than by only looking for
challenges of the mind.
I like to think of myself as creative, but officially
I am not. I once had myself officially tested whether I could work for the
creative industry or not, and I was
not chosen. In any case, I enjoy fully creating almost
anything until it starts becoming a routine activity. In fact, I realised
that the more
I let go of the result of whatever I do, the more
exciting and fulfilling the activity
is.
Every adult is creative to some extent,
but it often happens that children get more applause for bringing good
grades or achieving
at sports events or are announced by the school or
their parents
to be smart, and so they automatically take this as the
secret of the best way of living.
By the time we get through formal
education, probably whatever school system it
is, we have developed our ways of thinking and
conformity, and unless we are picked
to be real artists, we believe we cannot be creative.
In the Swiss local schools children have
a large number of creating „basteln” classes until they go to secondary level from the 5th or 6th grade
primary school depending on the Kanton. Roughly until the age of 10 or 11 they
learn to use many different techniques
and material to create a great variety
of handmade things. No wonder there are so many hobby
artists at different fairs all over the
country.
In my life and work, in those cases
when I was designing
and building any project, concept, market, program, or
our private flats and houses the
same feeling of fulfillment and joy
came. From the time, when in my work
it became a must to plan the result
in advance and to that result adjust
activity, work started to be less fun and less
fulfilling. What we are payed for is to bring the right results of someone else’s vision.
Structure, intellectual development in a narrowed area or the feeling
of security from wanting to know what will happen
in the future are inevitable in adult life.
This does not mean that we
shouldn’t play and bring our own “free thinking and feeling childhood”
back for a short
time.
Nowadays that I deliberately do more
creative activity, I am just more fully
me, more alive, and I feel much
happier. It can be any small activity
like jumping on a trampoline, painting pictures during travelling, cooking
without a recipe, playing
anything with children, dancing, sewing...
It does not have to be anything great, just do it
for the sake
of playing in some way. Making pictures with pastel for me is a good start because I need to make an effort to be patient for bigger projects. With pastel I can quickly make a picture or
express an imagination. It covers the
page well and
has a ready look. It is a nice and short experience of playing and fun without being trained or without having any special artistic talents.
Specially at the Christmas
Season when everything is about creating
internally and externally, we spend more
time with decorating, creating
ideas, gifts, plans, environments. Luckily we
do not need to wait for the
year end. In the everyday life it is necessary to think in new ways,
do new interesting things which keep us alive and
energetic. Even if we are not working
in a creative field boosting, discovering and bringing our creative self to surface brings
fulfillment to our lives.
We need to be able to think in different
ways, because problems can only be solved with a different thought than which the problem was created by.
If you know
you need more
fulfillment and joy, it is time
to slow down, look for the creativity inside you, buy paint
or show up at a class.
Do not think. Thinking is the enemy
of creativity. It is self-conscious,
and anything self-conscious
is lousy. You can not try to do
things. You simply must do things.
–Ray Bradbury
