Creativity

“They recited the righteous acts of the Lord.”
Judges 5:11

Originality is very important for those people who are in the business of creativity. We strive to see something that has never been seen before and create something that has never been discovered by anyone.

“There is no new thing under the sun,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. What we are trying to do is an impossible task, and those of us who claim to have succeeded in their endeavor of finding something entirely new merely deceive themselves. We can only claim that we have create something relatively novel, but not entirely new.

I had no boundaries for my writing when I was a young poet and for me, like most of my peers, composing was a form of searching for something more permanent in a changeable world. I was free to roam in a world of unbridled imagination but often came out empty, for I wasn’t at all certain about the certainty of all the things that I had created through writing.

Nothing makes sense unless we have found an absolute we can use to measure all the discoveries of our senses. “Is he a man; is man he?” This was the beginning line of one of the poems I wrote at age seventeen. I was searching for something as a young man, yet I had no idea that I was searching; I was completely lost, yet thoroughly enjoyed my lostness.

I enjoyed being in a stage of perpetual fluidity because it gave me the thrill of freedom and adventure. There are surprises in every corner when one is lost and the yearning to be found pales compared to the excitement of being lost. There is nothing to be hoped for if hope is finally realized, is there?

“I once was lost, but now am found.” John Newton’s search for home ceased when he was found and, humanly speaking, his life seemed to go downhill, for the slave-trader’s days of thrill-seeking were over. The winding river has left the valleys and hills behind and comes home to the ocean and becomes a mere droplet in an immense sea. There are quickening pulsations in the steady rhythm of the sea that keep us guessing and the thrill of its unpredicted predictability far surpasses the swelling river that breaks all the boundaries and floods the whole fruited plains.

I was becoming a man then, but had no earthly idea into what I was turning. I could have become many things, just like some of my friends. Some became alcoholics and drank themselves to death and others have become scholars who continue to seek something new in a giant pile of ancient documents and data and warm themselves with the dying heat of yesteryear. As for me, I will be content to be a small seashell that year after year keeps on riding the giant waves to the shore and will recite the old stories that I have heard to the ones who place the shell to their listening ears.