What is Creativity?
If you were to look up the dictionary definition of creativity, it would say something like ‘the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.’ That’s what comes up when you Google it.
Some words listed as similar include inventiveness, imagination, innovation, originality, expressiveness, vision, and resourcefulness.
But what does that actually mean?
There are so many different facets to creativity.
Creative Arts
Creativity is making beautiful things to enrich lives. That could be music, food, words, art, telling stories, or playing pretend. It is found in design and fashion and in tending a garden, and in making a mess and coming up with ways to get organized again. Putting together a beautiful home and welcoming people into your space to share hospitality and love is another way to exercise your creative talents.
Creativity is experiencing those beautiful things in your life and in the world around you. Appreciating and supporting the passions of others will bring even more joy and beauty to the world. So will seeing what their gifts inspire in you,
Creativity is emotion. It is putting the expression of your soul into something inherently technical to make it authentically and exclusively yours. Anyone can use a ruler and draw a perfectly straight line, but where is the depth of feeling and excitement in that? A line that wanders, that curves and wobbles, that crosses back and forth over itself is much more alluring. It has a story – just like all of us.
Practical Creativity
Much of the time, people associate creativity with the arts but there is so much more to it than that.
Creativity is also problem solving: science and math, our thought process, the scientific method. It is trial and error. Whatever theory you are trying to investigate, you simply have to use your imagination in order to come up with all the different ways to test your hypothesis.
Creativity is facing and overcoming challenges, thinking of the possible solutions, and working through them one by one until your desired result is achieved.
Creativity is in all personal relationships and human interactions. It is how we navigate through life and how we relate to others. It is how we understand our world and it is what makes us original and authentic.
To break it down to the simplest definition, creativity is discovery. Discovery of beauty, of solutions, of possibility.
Most importantly, creativity exists in all of us. Let me say that again: Creativity exists in all of us. It is one of the greatest gifts we have been given and it is present within us throughout our entire existence. No matter where our lives take us and what paths we walk upon, I truly believe that we have all been born to create.
