“How much do I appreciate my creativity?”
When I think of creativity, what first comes to mind is creation: artifacts, works, and ideas.
I now realize I’ve severely under appreciated creativity’s role in my life. To say creativity creates works and ideas is to say food only creates nourishment. When it’s so much more.
I’ve come to find creativity doesn’t just create ‘creative works’—but Creativity creates life itself.
He said, “I write what I see
Write to make it right, don’t like where I be
I’d like to make it like the sights on TV
Quite the great life, so nice and easy.”—Lupe Fiasco, Hip-Hop Saved My Life
Creativity is the force that calls us to explore the limits of what is possible.
In Hip-Hop Saved My Life, Lupe Fiasco tells the story of a rapper’s big break. He starts with the writer’s (and rappers are writers) inner monologue. “I write to make it right, don’t like where I be… I’d like to make it like the sights on TV.”
As the artist in the song’s creativity takes hold, he’s first called to change his life, and we feel his life changing, even though nothing has changed in his circumstance. The chorus “hip-hop you saved my life” makes it explicit.
Creativity became purpose, creative work became talent, applied talent became art, creative drive became hustle, creative essence became enjoyment and its fruits the taste of pleasure.1
Creativity doesn’t create creative works, it first creates the definition of our lives.
Viktor Frankl in his memoir on surviving concentration camps described the last freedom, as the freedom to “choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” The three d’s: depression, despondency and despair, among others, do their best to blind us to this freedom. It’s here that we find creativity’s first battlefront, the first battle that must be won.
No matter where we are, Creativity’s first fight is to expand and increase our belief and purview into what’s possible for our lives. Creativity is our first mover unmoved. We must use creativity, to create creativity, first to create a belief in a different life.
Everything I am first began as a curiosity, ‘could this be possible?’ Next a belief, then a habit.
Sometime later, often very later—it becomes my reality.
Now I recognize, Creativity is my inner life force, it must be nourished, and it must be protected as such.
I’m grateful for my Creativity.
“How much do you appreciate your Creativity?“
- See also Enjoyment v. Pleasure, the fruit of creativity only tastes of pleasure when rightfully earned, otherwise it has a bitter bite or an artificial saccharin sweetness. ↩︎
Mikal-El 