Creativity

cre . a . tiv . i . ty /noun/ inventiveness, imagination, innovativeness, originality, individuality, vision,  initiative

The word creativity shines a light on our unexpressed desires.  Have you ever found yourself wishing you were more creative?  I have, especially while looking at a beautiful landscape painting, or watching  a well choreographed play, or even after reading a great novel. It seems that some people have an inordinate amount of this thing called creativity while others don’t have any, or at least that’s what we often tell ourselves. Is it that the gatekeepers  have convinced us that the creative people are the artists and the musicians?  We should know better, however. It is the “gate seekers” who are the creative ones.  They take a different, often unusual or unconventional, approach to living.

Creativity, our word for this week, has a wide range of meanings, and if you look carefully at the ones that I have singled out, and then look at your own experience, I’m sure you’ll find that at least one of them fits you perfectly.  If you make imaginative use of your time and resources, or you are inventive with your friend and family relationships,  or you are innovative in finding solutions to your problems and even those of others, you qualify.  You are creative.

For some reason I’ve been thinking of the word chortle for the past few weeks.  It struck me that it was deliberately created–a made-up word  by Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. He coined chortle for his book Through the Looking Glass.  That word, and many others that Carroll created,  found their way into the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (the venerable OED) gives the meaning of chortle as “to  exclaim exultingly  with a noisy chuckle.”  Linguists call chortle and other words created by Carroll  “portmanteau”  words, a portmanteau being an old-fashioned name for a suitcase.   These  suitcase words pack parts of two or more words together. Chortle joins  parts of “chuckle” and “snort,” and falls under the  official linguistic category of “blends.”  We have quite a few of them in English. These examples are  in common use today.

motor and hotel   =   motel
smoke and fog     =    smog
breakfast and lunch  = brunch
simultaneous and broadcast  = simulcast
fantastic and fabulous  = fantabulous

Earlier this year a new blend was added to our vocabulary without anyone even questioning it. The British voted on Brexit (a part of “Britain” plus “exit”) while all the world watched. Lewis Carroll’s creativity lives on.

The first airplane was a creative act.  All through my reading of  The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough,  I was keenly aware of the two brothers’ enormous  capacity for invention.  But although the results of the ordinary person’s creativity are less spectacular than the invention of an airplane,  they are nonetheless  impressive in their own way. Have you ever gone to your kitchen, having not the slightest clue what to fix for dinner, but after puttering  around, blending  and mixing,  you emerge an hour later with a delectable meal?  Your creativity was at work.  A young lady came to dinner and helped me set the table. When I saw what she had done with the napkins, I marveled. They were attractively folded,  looped and displayed like a fancy pocket handkerchief. That is creativity. A group of women at a senior living facility get together once a week to knit. Their handiwork elicits  admiration–and sales. The beautiful multicolored bedspreads are works of art, a testament to their creativity.

It may seem like the wrong advice to give to aspiring writers, but Austin Kleon, in his book Steal Like an Artist, tells them to grab ideas from anywhere they can in the way that a Picasso or a Van Gogh did, blending influences from different eras and  cultures to create their own magnificent works  of art. Creativity can help us know how to selectively learn from other people,  times, and places and distill the new knowledge  into our own creation of beauty.

Some of the things I use in my home amaze me with the creativity of the people who made them. For instance, I am happy for and  impressed with the pop-up lid on a can of vegetables.  A creative person circumvented the can opener.  I think, too, of the sensor in my  washing machine with its variety of buttons to help cue the machine to water level,  added fabric softener, or the size of a wash-load. It knows and adjusts. Creativity went into the making of my washing machine. I know that the cell phone is the result of a creative genius. Actually, as far as I am concerned, all things technological are, but  when I project information on the screen in my classroom and my students whip out their cell phones and take a picture of it instead of taking notes, I have a whole new appreciation for the person who created the gadget,  “giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing,” to use  author Daniel Pride’s words.

Creativity is something we all inherited, not merely from our parents, but from our Creator, who is its wellspring. He brought forth humankind, an original, made in His image, and put within each one  of us something of Himself. Whatever our vocation or station in life, we have the right stuff, placed there right from the beginning. We can all claim our birthright of inherited creativity and put it to work for good in the world.

Blessings,

Judith

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“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.”
Henry David Thoreau