What is creativity? Is creativity merely the action of creating-whether it be a sculpture, a short story, or Slavic-Thai fusion chili?  Or is creativity something larger, more basic; is it an instinct? 

Some well-known minds weigh in on the subject. I will, of course, add my own two cents…

Let’s begin by  nodding at greatness. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.”  One could stretch the kernel of her meaning and define creativity as a process of recognizing the truth in a seemingly strange idea. Is that all that creativity means? Is that definition too narrow? Or is that too abstract for you?  Let’s look at some more concrete definitions… 

-Webster’s Dictionary

-Carl Jung

“ The emergence of a novel, relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual.”

-Carl Rodgers, respected psychologist, founder of the self-psychology school

“ The occurrence of a composition which is both new and valuable.”

-Henry Miller

“Any thinking process in which original patterns are formed and expressed.”

-HH Fox, scientist

 ”It is…fluency , flexibility, originality, and sometimes elaboration.”

-E. Paul Torrance (educator, academic, “creativity investigator,” whatever that means in academia)

-Michele Shea

 ”Creative thinking involves imagining familiar things in a new light, digging below the surface to find previously undetected patterns, and finding connections among unrelated phenomena.”

-Roger von Oech

So, what is creativity? To me, creativity means abandoning my thoughts of what is outside my window in the wet, green grass, pushing past my thoughts of what “should be” outside my window on the freshly-mowed green grass, and embracing my musings of what could be outside my window in the thorny, red grass.  

I invite your feeback and definitions…

For a pithy look at this subject, read D. Keyser’s “Define Creativity-I Dare You”at…

 Source of the Day-

PS-Happily, it looks like a co-writer, J. from Maine, will be joining me on this blog project to better address how creativity and resilience intersect. This should mean more ideas and, eventually, more frequent posts. We are both looking forward to seeing where these ideas lead us…