The importance of being creative
What is the key to creativity and how does it help your mental health? Excerpts from Beverley D’Silva journalist's article published in the BBC, Telegraph brings below. Maya Angelou says that creativity is an endless pit: "The more you use it, the more you have", said the novelist. "Creativity is intelligence while having fun," is a phrase often attributed to Albert Einstein. While the master of marketing, David Ogilvy, came to this from a business perspective: "If not sold, it is not creative.
We know that creativity is alive in all areas of life. But the word derived from creare in Latin - to do - is more often associated with the arts and culture. It is believed to have first appeared in the fourteenth-century literary work The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
"Creativity is the natural order of life. "Life is energy - pure creative energy", is one of the 10 basic principles found in Julia Cameron's guide, "The Artist's Way". The subtitle is "Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" because, as she says, "for me, creativity is a spiritual experience." For Cameron, there is no "creative elite"; we are all creative.
Her recipe for "creative recovery" is to write "morning pages" - three handwritten pages. The sites "develop our creativity and encourage confidence in our potential," she says. "Artist Date" is her second tool; a weekly experience to promote the "interior artist" - such as a visit to the zoo or the purchase of pencils.
Her new book, The Way of Listening: The Creative Art of Attention, reviews these two tools and adds to the walk "to boost the 'aha' moment." The book focuses on listening - to others, yourself, the environment, your ancestors, silence.
"People always asked me how I could continue to be so productive, and my answer is that I listen - and 'hear' what I need to do next," she says.
Intuition and "instruction" that "comes from within" have helped him stay without drinking since he was 29 years old - after many battles with alcohol. If he drank, she says, he would have to say goodbye to creativity. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the "Artist's Road" is a 12-week "recovery" system, in the same way that anonymous alcoholics follow a 12-step recovery program.
Cameron says she received a "message" in her 20s when she was sent by Playboy magazine to interview film director Martin Scorsese: "I heard a voice say, 'This is the man with whom will you marry'. I said to myself, does he know this? That quickly happened. They got married and have a daughter, Domenican who is now 46 years old, a film director who has faithfully written "Morning Pages" since her mother came up with the idea.
An inner voice that you do not want to pay attention to is the "inner critic". Cameron knows hers - she even has a character, Nigelin, who is a British interior designer "for whom nothing is ever good". She has faced him for publishing 40 books and writing songs and musicals despite being the "non-musical person" in the family.
"When she teaches creative unlocking, I unlock it myself," she says of why she continues to teach in her 70s, without a plan to retire.
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert acknowledges Cameron's influence on her, saying "without 'The Artist's Way' it would not be 'Eat, Pray, Love', referring to 2006 memoirs that have sold 12 million copies. Gilbert explored creativity in her 2015 book, The Great Magic: Creative Life Beyond Fear. She was inspired to write it after meeting many people who complained that they were creatively trapped. Their main problem was "fear and the accumulation of fear."
"Creativity always provokes your fears," says Gilbert.
Freedom to make mistakes, especially at a young age, is vital to creativity, said the late Ken Robinson, whose speech, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" is one of the most watched videos in the history of TED. "We know that if you are not prepared to make mistakes, you will never come up with something original," he said. He lamented the fact that we are often "educated without creativity", seeing this as a failure of the education system.
It was the master of advertising, Alex Osborne, who is often referred to as the pioneering teacher of creativity. Osborne, or "the father of brainstorming," developed the Creative Education Foundation in the 1950s and '60s. The lecture on "problem solving", or CPS, had four steps: clarification, conceptualization, development and implementation. It starts with two assumptions: everyone is creative in some way and creative skills can be learned and strengthened.
Following in his footsteps, Dorte Nielsen has dedicated his life to helping others become creative thinkers. After dealing with advertising in the 1990s, Nielsen returned to her native Denmark to establish the Center for Creative Thinking in Copenhagen.
"Creative thinking is like any other skill in life. "The more you practice, the better you become," says Nielsen.
Her latest work, "The Secret of the Very Creative Thinker: How to Make Connections That Others Do Not," talks about increasing creativity and the exercises that inspire connections and creative thinking.
"Very creative people are good at seeing connections," she says. "It simply came to our notice then