No one is creative

No one is creative.

I consider myself a creative person…well at least I used to.

Lately on my journey of self discovery I’ve began to wonder if anyone is really creative.

If you think I’m crazy, you might be right, I hope you are - sanity is banal.
However please allow me to illustrate why I have reached this peculiar conclusion.

Have you ever wondered why so many artists, writers, musicians and so on, feel the need to take drugs or drink themselves out of their lack of eureka moments.
This wretched cliché is commonly refereed to as the tortured creative spirit.

Why is it, I wonder, that plumbers never reach a plateau or a point in their career that they will never be able to top?

I’ve never heard of a builder who was a one house wonder.

Why is it then - that our creative minds constantly beat themselves up once they have achieved something? It’s that inherent fear that you can never do better than that last project that seemed to matter.

The Greeks had the answer. You see the Greeks did not blame themselves. In ancient Greece people did not have ideas, they were given them. The Greeks believed ideas and creativity flowed through them. They were merely instruments for the spirits of gods, which they called muses. Guess what the Romans called these spirits? – Geniuses.

What a way to live, the most prolific artist could just stop all of a sudden and there was no pressure to perform because the gods were not talking to him anymore - So how could he paint?

Imagine this today – no deadlines, no performance criteria, no sequel, nothing but pure inspiration.

The idea that creativity comes from a realm apart from ours is surely the biggest pile of bollocks you’ve heard today right?

Well maybe.

I heard a lady talk recently about how she writes poems, they come on the wind. She has to run inside and get a pen and write them down. If she is too late, she sometimes can reach out grab it and pull it back but when this happens the poem comes out backwards and she has to rewrite it for it to make sense.

Stephen King, says when he writes he is in a sleep like state sometimes he wakes up and realizes he has written paragraphs.

Two books you might have heard of that the authors claim to have written with total divine inspiration:

The Bible & The English dictionary.

The purpose of all this ranting is to say simply this:

If you’re creative maybe you should surrender to the idea that you are not the master and let go. Be happy if no light bulbs are flashing above your head. Be at peace.

If you are not a creative person, try listening to that silent voice that lingers in the top right side of your brain. Great ideas are not shouted they are whispered.

Think of ideas like a winzip file, you might receive one but it will be useless unless you manage to extract it.