Getting Creative With Creativity

I had the opportunity to participate in the BYU Women's Conference this week with a sharing station on Family Work.  There were nearly 100 of these booths on various subjects filling a gymnasium.  So many inspiring ideas from great women.  I felt privileged to be a part of it. 

I especially loved being there with Abby and my sister, Carolyn, who both helped me in the booth. (I never did get a picture with Carolyn!)

I ran into so many old friends I haven't seen in years, met new friends, and got to spend time with some of my very favorites:

 When I was asked to participate, I was given the assignment of

"Creative ways for involving children in household activities." 

I thought to myself: "Please, No.  I'm not creative!"  At least I don't feel creative.  I like to copy other people's ideas.  The really good ones.  That's generally how I operate.  In fact, this past year, I've been especially perplexed by my lack of creativity-  wondering what TO the world I have to offer that is uniquely me.  That's probably why I was asked to do this booth.  It forced me to take a look at something so fundamental and routine in our house and transform it from abstract to concrete (i.e. pull it out of my head and present it visually for all to see.)  In the process, I learned that perhaps I really have created something that is uniquely mine.  A combination of elements I've pulled from other people, other sources and re-worked, re-shaped, re-vised, added to, to create a system that works in our home. 

Wow.  Can it be?  Can I really consider myself among the "creative" of the world?

Theoretically, I know that somehow every single one of us is creative by nature.  After all, is not God The Grand Creator?  And are we not all Children of that creative God?

I suppose I've always thought creativity had to mean coming up with an innovative idea from absolute scratch:  like the telephone.  Or creating something visually expressive.  Artists, scientists, inventors and writers are creative.  Painters, poets, composers and dancers, too.  I have a smidgeon of that type of talent, presently lying dormant.  But I read something recently that gave me a new perspective on creativity.  In Toward a Psychology of Being, Abraham Maslow says:

"One woman, uneducated, poor, a full-time housewife and mother, did none of these conventionally creative things and yet was a marvellous cook, mother, wife and home-maker.  With little money, her home was somehow always beautiful.  She was a perfect hostess.  Her meals were banquets.  Her taste...was impeccable.  She was in all these areas original, novel, ingenious, unexpected, inventive.  I just had to call her creative.  I learned from her and others like her that a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting, and that, generally, cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be; it could be uncreative. "

I am not that woman.  But do you see how he expands the definition to include, for instance, beauty?  Despite being poor, he says, "her home was somehow always beautiful."  It wasn't any one particular thing she had created, it was a feeling.  I love to think of creativity from this perspective.  To think that

I don't have to come up with an ingenious new product or paint a pastoral scene on canvas.  I can be creative emotionally. 

Maslow continues with such an example: 

"Another was a psychiatrist, a "pure" clinician who never wrote anything or created any theories or researches but who delighted in his everyday job of helping people to create themselves.  This man approaced each patient as if he were the only one in the world... Each patient was a unique human being and therefore a completely new problem to be understood and solved in a completely novel way.  His great success even with very difficult cases validated his "creative" way of doing things."

Isn't that precisely what parenthood is all about?  Parents are creative- not only in the sense of giving life to their children, but in all they do to shape their characater; to help their children create themselves. 

Activities, processes and even attitudes are creative. Relationships can be creative.

Anything we bring to life is an act of creativity.  Even a state of being. 

I realized that while our Family Work system at home is just a conglomoration of half a dozen ideas from other people and a few of my own- it is the way I put them together and the perspective with which I approach it which can be unique and creative.  But more importantly, because of it, I can literally create a feeling of order and harmony in our home.   I am creative when I succeed in bringing a feeling of peace, love and happiness into our home through a myriad of other ways I try to approach life and parenting.  Believe me, I am not nearly as successful as I would like to be!  But those feelings, more than any sculpture, painting, gadget or system, are what I desire most to create. 

I am creative, folks!  And so are you!  No more going around declaring that we just aren't creative.  Humbug!  We are!  Every single one of us!  Think about it.  And delight in it. 

Because this just might be your contribution to the world!