THE LAW OF CREATIVITY

"Creative Chaos", oil, by Liza Hirst

A student said to me yesterday that she wasn’t very “creative”, and I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to offer a careful response. I should have told her that all of us are always creative, because we can’t help it. It’s our very nature to create. We produce countless creations each moment, though we are usually not aware of this. All of us, including this young student, are actually multifaceted, efficient factories that constantly produce astounding products. As my students and I are sitting in my classroom, our bodies are working at precipitous speeds -- pulling in air, pumping blood, reshaping cells. This student who thinks she’s not creative is actually housing an enormously complex system of operations, more complicated than the most sophisticated factory. While she sits and considers her deficiency in creativity, her brain is producing dazzling miracles called thoughts at startling speeds. These thoughts, actually, represent the most amazing aspect of her creativity. The very thought that told her she was not creative was the result of an extraordinarily beautiful creative process. In some inscrutable way, her mind continually takes part in the most productive activity the universe has yet developed, called “thinking”. By saying she was not creative, she was simply showing that she is, that she can’t help it, that she has to be, that it’s the law.