What is Creativity?

Creativity is Unavoidable. We create continuously, from our blood cells to our thoughts, from our facial expressions to our conversations. In a sense, we create every moment. It is our unconscious, habitual behaviour that prevents us from realizing this.

Creativity is a conversation between What Is and What Might Be. This conversation can be individual or collective. The fruit of such a conversation is a blooming of the universal in the personal and the particular. Something specific - an idea, a sound, a process, an object - is born.

Creativity is a positive lapse of judgement that allows the conscious and the unconscious to become coherent. In some cases, creativity can be fully realized in a moment - a wry comment, a musical improvisation. At other times, the initial insight must be nurtured and developed. Think of a new product, a song or a business process.

Without creativity, we reenact the past. Sometimes this is fine; you don't really need to come up with a different way to drink orange juice each morning. In many instances, though, it leaves us stuck, grappling with seemingly intractable problems and situations. Creative openings take us beyond our habitual way of seeing, thinking and feeling and allow new possibilities to take root.

We feel most truly alive when we are creating. Why? Because we are aligned with a fundamental truth of our existence: change. Every thing rises, remains for a while, and then falls away. No thing is quite the same from one moment to the next, sometimes reformulating dramatically, sometimes almost imperceptibly. When we create, we carry out this process consciously and experience the truth of it on many levels.