Getting creative

We meet many people, and young people, who are bored. For many this is an affectation, but a dangerous one, that can easily become a full time state of mind. At the weekend I was at an Open Fencing tournament where my son competed. One of the top fencers there confided to me, after he had won all the matches in his poule, that he was bored – it was too easy. I saw others at the top affecting the same state – their body language telling their opponents that this really was a waste of their valuable time. And yet there were too other top fencers who seemed to enjoy the whole thing and give their opposition respect. Which of these were really fencers?

As my friend, Dr Keith Selby, used to observe when graduate students complained to him that they were bored with the course, with the tutors, with the books: “You are bored because you don't know enough”. This is a profound observation – nothing is boring, not even train spotting, if we but knew enough about it. If we could throw ourselves wholeheartedly into learning about any thing we would find that there is a whole world of interest there. And we would also find that everything, the deeper you go, is connected.

In fact, the deeper you go, the less learning becomes important; for when we learn there is a reason for it – our personal reason and the fact that learning itself is a discipline with structures. But as we go deeper we go into the heart of the mystery whereby the only reason for anything is itself! It alone is what it is and for that reason is fascinating. The best analogy for this is love: if we love somebody for any reason – wealth, looks, sex, status, advantage, revenge, control, manipulation, security or anything – other than simply for themselves, then we have never loved.

Thus love is essentially creative; or, to be creative is to love because the craftsman or woman always loves their tools and materials: the clay, the canvas, the pen, the piano, the backdrop to the creative activity – the garden in which the plants are to be arrayed.

Creativity is independent of need or wealth or anything else – it happens because it is essential in the sense of being of the essence of the Spirit itself, and so of our spirit. That's why there are billions and trillions of blades of grass: when God made the first one, he didn't think, Job Done! The experience was so good, he carried on making those grass blades because every single one gave a wow! Look, another one! And another – wow! How good does that feel?

And so too we must keep wrestling with the next blade till it is created and the life comes and comes alive. The life we live needs to be a work of art that comes alive – Pygmalion-like, if you will. And where does all this creativity begin? It begins in the imagination – where all things are possible.