1

I met someone the other day (it doesn’t matter which one) whose career it is to study creativity. I asked him if he thought of himself as a creative person. A creative, because we’ve started to use the adjective as a noun sometime in the 21^st century.

He paused.

I wish I knew what he had thought during that pause. It would have been informative.

“Of course,” he said.

I’m not so sure.

2

I think (almost) every human is creative. If creative means to want to make things. Chairs, pipelines, electric cars, houses, food, gardens, as well as art.

Somewhere along the way, though, something (probably capitalism) started to turn many of us into consumers, rather than makers.

And to fetishize creativity.

This isn’t good.

3

Hack: Writing in short stanzas is a creative cheat on how to craft a first draft of an essay without transitions.

4

We’re talking about creativity, and you’re saying that work and school are sapping it, you have no juice for your own creative work.

I hear you. I’ve had the same experience, in the past, sometimes in the present.

I try to reframe it: See creativity in what I do for work. In what I do in the kitchen, in my house, with my children. With my friends, when I arrange a gathering.

It all comes from the same artery, from the same heart. 

You’re not convinced.

I hear you. I don’t always convince myself either. I privilege the poem over the speech; the novel over the strategic plan.

But really. It’s all the same.

Can you see?

5

The creativity expert studies creativity because he both fetishizes it and devalues it. 

And also fears it.

But it’s so simple.

What makes it complicated, or difficult, is the perceived need to monetize it, capitalize it.

Imagine if you just… don’t.

6

I’m practicing the basics right now. Breathing. Moving. Eating.

Loving.

Sometimes, it’s difficult. It shouldn’t be. But it is.

7

I’m in a room full of ordinary people who all want to be extra-ordinary. Who all think they are extra-ordinary.

I’m bored. And sad. I retreat inward, into breath and stillness. Then movement.

Creativity, making isn’t extra-ordinary. It’s as ordinary, as basic as life gets.

Let’s not fetishize it.

xoxo

“Jane”