I've been correcting some minor typos today on the Taxonomy's framework for creativity, second section just posted. I wonder if it will connect with people? That set off musings…
The blogosphere is full of creativity at present and most of it is about getting ideas. But ideas are easy. Even good ideas are rather easy. All that's required to make an idea good is for someone to call it 'good'. Or even 'brilliant'. Or, to be on the cutting edge of language, 'awesome'.
Being in a group is a great way to agree that an idea is awesome. As well as a reluctance to criticize, there is group approval and the urge for consensus. Groupthink hasn't disappeared just because it occurs via social media. If anything, it seems to be more intense rather than less.
A challenge requires ideas, but what seems to be hard is making anything happen more or less as desired, as an individual or in a group. This blogging of mine about TOP is a great example. Simple idea. Great idea. Awesome idea. Yet seemingly dozens of impediments in practice—you've probably experienced some of the glitches and layout changes and they're not over yet!
But why is it so hard?
I suppose we feel we control our ideas—but we don't control the world on which our creativity operates and where we want our ideas to happen. In using ideas and words we become entangled with the world out there. Our minds and our realities get all mixed up with each other, until it is hard to work out what is going on and what we should be doing, why it isn't all working as we expected, and why it's hard to commit and hard to stop committing.
In the small scheme, I guess that reality doesn't matter too much. With this blogging, Tim (my webmaster) and I just keep fiddling with it until eventually enough is enough and we'll stop. But if you want your creativity to do more than tinker ... if you want it to get a proper fix on reality. Then it has to be for a big scheme. Not for small things like getting on with life, success and happiness.
But in the big scheme of things, getting a fix on reality, getting to grips with it, getting such a tight hold that it can't wriggle away—and you willingly suffer the consequences—now that's hard. It seems that the intense tension that gets developed, through being entangled and continuing to cut your way through to something solid, asks a lot of you. Possibly too much.
T.S. Eliot, no creativity slouch, wrote “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” He was an encouraging fellow: “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
Reality is one topic that is not going away.
WK
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Warren Kinston