Are we all creative?

I’ve just listened to a podcast of a Danish psychologist, where she claimed that creativity is one of the most underrated areas in psychology when it comes to people’s quality of life. And I couldn’t agree more. We know that creative activities can be beneficial for mental health, dealing with stress or working through difficult feelings. However, we don’t talk enough about the preventive powers of creativity and why it is necessary for a human being to stay creative at least as much as to be physically active. 

For whatever reason, our society decided to treat creativity as either some luxurious spare time folly or an exclusive item limited to highly talented people who in their creative endeavours contribute to the development of the whole society. If you aren’t one of those creative geniuses and if by any chance you have limited spare time, you are very likely to push creative activities either lower on your priority list or completely out of your life. 

Sir Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk (and books) argued, that schools kill creativity and that we are being educated out of it. Just think about it, how natural it is for a small child to pick up a pencil and draw, to build, sculpt, make sounds and all of this. We would be worried about their development if they didn’t. Yet, we are not worried at all about adults who don’t draw, paint, sing or make. We just say “Nah, he/she is not creative” and move on. 

Why on Earth would small children naturally engage in such activities, why would we have art throughout the history of humankind, if it was not essential? And yet we think that we can simply opt-out from being creative and at the same time maintain our overall health. 

Now, I’m not talking about everyone picking up oil paints and starting to paint elaborate landscapes. I’m talking about “everyday creativity”. Or better creative activities. It can be as simple as knitting a hat, doodling for a while or playing a musical instrument. It can include making things for your own home or just writing down your thoughts and playing with words a little. You can do it as a part of your job, your time spent in your home or with other people, it doesn’t matter what form and shape such activity takes. The most deciding factor is the enjoyment of the process, the fact that you are bringing to existence new forms and ideas and that it is not all happening just inside your head but you use your body to make it happen.

There are many reasons and possible explanations why this has a positive impact on our lives, but for the sake of this blog, let’s just leave it here. The drive to create something, to engage with the world and to use our body and mind for expression is something deeply ingrained in our humanness. We can’t simply dismiss it, we can only suppress it. And when we do, it shows at some point, somewhere. Similar to physical activity which has a direct impact on overall health, creative activities impact our psyche. And we really should care for our minds as much as we care for our bodies. 

.... you make your own path as you walk

About two weeks ago, I was trying to describe to my coach (yes, I do have a creativity coach) how I happened to be in a (metaphorical) place where I felt a bit lost. It was as if all the clarity of previous weeks and months was obscured by a very thick fog and I could see just about a meter in front of me, but nothing else. I was trying to describe to her, that it wasn't just fog, it seemed as if the path wasn't there at all. I voiced my concern, that I might be just walking in circles instead of keeping my direction to where I’d like to go. (And yes, I love a good metaphor, lol).

When she was listening to me, she remembered a poem. It is called Caminante no hay camino and was written by Antonio Machado. The point of the poem is, there is no path to follow. The path is made by walking and you can see it only when you look back, knowing you will never walk there again.

People who create art, new businesses or are trying to live on their own terms, don’t have a path to follow. We all have to figure it out, there is wilderness and us. The motorways and pavements and "walks in the parks" where most people gather, do not interest us. They are miles away where we can hardly see or hear them.

It is not the most convenient choice, but it is the only one that feels true. One step at a time, walking forward in unknown territory. The side effect of this situation is, that we can often feel lost. And everything only starts making sense when we look back.

From this perspective, feeling lost is a good thing. It is a sign that we are genuinely present on our own path and not following anyone else’s prescriptions and shoulds (nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you want, of course).

I’m still struck by the wisdom and beauty of this imagery. It is something I want to keep on top of my mind every time I feel insecure and disoriented.

At the end of the day, the fog will always clear up and the milestones will become visible. Until then, it is just one step at a time…

The poem is:

Antonio Machado

“Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship's wake on the sea.

A glimpse of wilderness in the Irish overcultivated landscape… That’s where I want to be!

Where is the home for creativity?

I suppose that once we start wondering what creativity is, we are forced to start thinking about where it is? As I said before, not only that psychology doesn’t really know how to define creativity as a phenomenon, there is also no consensus about where to look for it. If it sounds weird, let me explain.

If we followed the line of psychological research, the first assumption on creativity was that it is something extraordinary artists possess. They are born with it, they use it, it is part of their persona, some sort of “happy accident” of mother nature that gave a gift to some and left out the most. Well, thanks to this perspective, quite a lot of studies were done to understand what separates these creative geniuses from everyone else. From this research psychology later moved on to examining personality traits, looking for something that would indicate “creativity” in a similar sense we understand intelligence. Despite numerous testing mechanisms that have been developed since the early 20th century, neither of them truly measures what we call creativity. They do measure something, often that something is in one way or another related to creative thinking or expression, but it's not quite there yet.

The question of whether creativity is indeed found in individuals as separate entities has been raised in the 60s. When it became obvious that creativity is heavily dependent on the social context in which it unfolds. So instead of creative persons, psychologists started to measure creative products. (not going into details, but basically, a committee decided whether some outcomes are or aren’t creative based on their education and experience within a certain culture).

Well, that didn’t really seem to solve the dilemma either. People like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began to pay more attention to what is actually happening between the individual and the social environment and started studying creative manifestation as a process.

The trouble is, not all process is inspired by creative ideas or results in a creative product, so where is creativity? Is it the environment, the person, the process or the product? Or maybe all of them?

There are areas of psychology that consider the idea that the mind is not limited to the human body. It is much more than that. There have been several concepts and attempts to describe this, and I think when it comes to creativity we are actually up to something here. It doesn’t fully exist in any particular element but as a dynamic interaction between them. We can call it a collective mind, psychodynamic process or use a metaphor of a muse or daimon that is not quite in one's head but inhabits a space in between the worlds and brings inspiration and courage to execute the idea from the unknown dimensions into the material reality.

What a beautiful, beautiful thought!

I took this photo on my way home… It just made me very happy with all the orange and green in the middle of a busy road. A little bit in-between worlds.

What is creativity? - What psychology didn't get quite right (yet)

Reading time: 3 min 11 sec

The blessings and curses of psychology are, that everyone is a potential subject of a study and at the same time everyone can comment and openly disagree with whatever knowledge psychologists come up with. Just imagine how fun would science be if let’s say a biologist described what a nucleus is and how it behaves and the nucleus decided to disagree with him. Or if a botanist studying a population of orchids was reminded that she is missing the nuances in the unique expression of each plant? I mean, I’d love to live in a world like that, but that’s probably why I chose psychology in the first place. 

Why am I saying this? The trouble with any psychological phenomenon is, that it is not quite as easy to isolate, define, describe and examine as it is with let’s say a rock specimen. And creativity is in this sense particularly tricky. Possibly, that is one of the reasons why it has always been somewhere on the periphery of psychological interests. 

It hasn’t been until the 1960s that creativity research truly took off. I blame the zeitgeist and the power of flowers on this one. However, it became rather obvious, that we don’t exactly know what creativity is and every attempt to measure or study it in some way just touched on one of its aspects. Paradoxically, when psychology was scratching its imaginary head, everyone else seemed to know what creativity was. Common sense recognizes it, the science is never quite sure. After several decades of changing definitions, psychology finally agreed on one. Are you excited to hear it? Well… Creativity is the ability to create something new and efficient. 

That falls flat right on the belly of disappointment, right? The main argument behind the definition is, that creativity can be understood by its final product (whether material or not) and that such product needs to be not only original but also in some way useful. I could find about two hundred reasons to go on a long rant about why this definition is lazy and why we need a new one. But I will spare you for now. Instead, I will share what thoughts were going through my head when I was writing my psych. undergrad dissertation. 

Creativity is not just what you think, it is what you do. And vice versa. A creative idea in our society is called inspiration. And inspiration is maybe an element of creativity, but not creativity itself. Inspiration needs to be followed through and fulfilled in the cleanest form possible to become creativity. At the same time, just an action, let’s say building a house, or painting a portrait does not necessarily need to be creative. Similarly to intelligence, you can work on mathematical problems following pre-defined formulas without particularly engaging any intelligent thoughts, you can paint hundreds of paintings following youtube tutorials, but that doesn’t mean that you made good use of your creativity. (Just think about how we teach art at schools. How much room for inspiration do we leave for children and why do those who follow the instructions most closely get the highest recognition…) 

Creativity is not just what you think, or do, it is how you live. I know it sounds cheesy, but I’m not sure if there are better words. Creativity seems to be a way to relate to the world and you can’t just switch it off and on for the moment when you are in your studio or doing something so-called creative. Again, like intelligence, it does follow you everywhere you go. Just sometimes is more in our awareness. Now, you can surely choose not to act on inspiration (and that would be a whole long story as I suspect this choice is not particularly healthy in the long run), but you can’t just stop creativity altogether. 

So what is it? And does everybody has it? 

No serious psychologist would accept the proposal that creativity is energy. But it makes sense to understand it that way. It is an energy that drops into our minds with new ideas, it is the drive to make those ideas happen, it is something that happens between people and in cultures, it is dynamic rather than fixed and it is social rather than individual. It is something that happens in the spaces in between and never looks the same. And if we access it, nurture it and share it, then it grows and transforms. It makes things happen.

Creativity is a metaphor for magic. 

(Well, and for any academic enthusiasts, let's ponder on this a little bit longer. I suspect the answer will be somewhere in the sphere of psychodynamic, even though Freud himself gave up on it at some point. But that is a story for another day...)