…mere moments later! Voila, hub cap art! Well, no, not really. It took a little while to do, but it is a hub cap, and I’m pleased with the final product. With ideas for other projects I need to start and finish very soon, I knew I wasn’t going to take a lot of time for this piece, so it was fast tracked from the start. It didn’t come together as quickly as I’d have liked…partly because life got in the way. There was the Art Quilt Group Monday, and then dinner with a friend Tuesday. Dinner went longer than anticipated, primarily because we got caught up talking.
And what did we talk about? Well, creativity, of course, among other things. I feel so fortunate to have the lasting friendships I have, and they take time to foster and maintain. This one started in the workplace over 17 years ago. Actually, she’s the person who hired me for my current job. She’s gone on to other things, but we stay in touch.
As we talked about creativity, she admitted she could come up with ideas, but that she didn’t consider herself a creative person. I, on the other hand, am a believer in and advocate of everyone having some form of creativity. Why is that? I believe, based on my Judeo-Christian upbringing, that we are all created in God’s image. And, again in Judeo-Christian theology and specifically from the very first sentence of the Bible we’re told that “In the beginning God created the….”
I’m not a religious person, and I don’t claim to have great spiritual knowledge or much understanding in the way of world religions, but what I take from that first Bible sentence is that God was there in the beginning, and the first thing we know He did was create. It’s later that we’re told we’re made in His image. The logic, for me, is that we all have a creative spark. We just don’t necessarily recognize it as such. To my limited understanding, other world religions consider God (or gods?) as the creator, so there is that commonality in our universal understanding.
Even if you’re a believer in some other form of how things came to be, such as the Big Bang Theory, you recognize there was a force, and that force made things happen…or created. Or, if you’re an evolutionist, you see that things evolved and changed…and change is creation or creativity, coming up with something new, different, hopefully better. Any belief system can accommodate a model of change and creativity, but that’s getting off onto a whole other tangent….
So, in catching up with my friend and recalling that she came up with ideas when we worked together (and I helped bring them to fruition), she gave herself credit for ideas, and more specifically for her liking of and ability to create systems and processes. That’s true – she always had a grasp of the big picture, how things flowed, how changes in one area would affect another, and so forth. And that’s what she likes, and that’s what I say is her creativity.
As I’ve noted previously in this blog, creativity isn’t always about making some thing; it’s a way of thinking. If you’re still labeling yourself as “not creative…at all” or as an I-can’t-draw-a-stick-figure person, maybe you’ll reconsider. Keys to identifying your creativity are what you like to do and how you spend your time. Do you, like my friend, feel productive when you devise, implement, trial, and revise systems? Do others say you have a knack for something? Is that something a joy to do? Does it make you happy? It just might be your creativity. Think about it….
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