Creativity
The days are warming and skies are clear in northern California. The morning started at 56 degrees fahrenheit. Today is Tuesday - and the birthday of Ming Tu!
Inspiration came yesterday at about 7:00 p.m., when the sun was going down and in mid-conversation, Ming says, "Oh my god! Look at that light..." as he grabbed the phone and opened the camera app to capture what caught his attention on the bedside table. Looking in the direction where he was squatting by the objects, the shadows and the objects were playing with each other and this is the sort of thing that definitely would NOT cause a conversation to stop for most people (certainly not me). But when creativity strikes, the most mundane can become something that stirs excitement in someone who walks through the world of creativity.
Who knows what that image will be used for in the next days. Maybe nothing. Maybe something very fun and playful. Or maybe in was just that the conversation was boring and the image that caught the eye created a spark of some kind - it's all a mystery.
The quality of having a capacity for creativity is a skill that is probably really important to develop these days. The things that have one purpose, may need to be put into service for an entirely different purpose going forward. For example, an easy one that I am thinking about is colanders. A colander is usually used to strain pasta, or to allow water to run through a bunch of grapes or cherries or steamed spinach. And - it can also be used to sift out rocks to transform rocky dirt into ground for planting vegetables. It can also be used as a planter or a picnic food protector or if you have a colorful colander, you can use it as part of the decor in the home - really, any number of other things that have yet to be discovered.
And it seems that this way of seeing things is going to be really important because the world we live in is turning upside down. The way we are using language and contradicting ourselves with actions offers a good way to illustrate why we need to be able to see things in new ways - war is bad, but we keep investing our collective resources in making more of it around the globe. Poverty is about food and shelter, yet society's social systems require millions of dollars to help people navigate policy and procedure to get both. Language has even turned upside down when "civil rights" create civil wrongs by making the ability to get relief so difficult. A lot of creativity has to go into making things useful again.
But simply being able to see something that is so easy to miss in everyday life is a skill. Some get a head start - artists, poets, musicians all have a way of being in the world that is just a little different. They have been endowed with a gift and the ones that know it, might very well save us all.