Creativity
By CPMAstudio In InsightCreativity: To Make Ideas Become Real
I had the privilege and joy of attending high school in New York City during the mid-80’s. It was an incredibly chaotic period in the city’s history, and also one of the most wildly creative. My mother was part of the downtown art scene, showing her paintings in a gallery in SoHo, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I went to school with the sons and daughters of television producers, ballet dancers, movie directors, painters and other wildly creative people. Many of my friends and acquaintances were emerging talents in their own right and went on to become professionally creative people themselves. Everyone I knew was a photographer and a poet and a filmmaker and was writing a screenplay and was in a band, and was acting or doing sound for someone’s avant garde performance piece. Some of the work was incredible, most of it wasn’t. It just didn’t matter. I jumped in headfirst and tried my hand at drawing and learned to play bass guitar, wrote short stories, poetry and a one-act play for my senior project and took photographs full of squiggles of taxicab taillights, rain-soaked boulevards and people riding graffiti covered subway cars. It was a great experience that has stayed with me to this day.
College was also full of creative people, but the buzz had changed. Granted, I was at a liberal arts college, not an art school, but people had clearly begun to compartmentalize. There were people who considered themselves “creatives”, and others who did not. However, I noticed that many of the people who were most successful in their studies had a both a physical outlet (such as athletics) and a creative outlet. There were biology majors minoring in dance, physics majors who played the cello, and political science majors who painted. I was not one of them at first. The workload utterly crushed me during my first semester, and I panicked. I put away the bass guitar and my journal and my camera; and stopped doing everything except study. I gazed in wonder at people who had time to sculpt and run and read about the Cuban Missile Crisis and make Dean’s List. I huddled in the library, but my grades were atrocious.
Then, I began to take martial arts classes, and I started to regain altitude. I wrote a play and entered it in a contest in which I got thoroughly trounced. I made Dean’s List my sophomore year. I got to the weight room and worked out with a Black Belt friend of mine and wrote poetry. I kept writing on my own, poetry and such, even when I was up to my eyeballs with schoolwork. My senior year I acted in a couple of plays, practiced martial arts regularly, and made straight A’s. I had become one of those people who seemed to have time for everything. My grades crumbled when I did nothing but study. Exercise helped, but they soared when I opened up my life to include exercise and creativity.
We’re running our summer camps now, the kids are playing four square and other games and taking Karate Classes. They are also being creative. Kids will spend hours drawing, building with legos, creating their own comic books, making necklaces, painting pictures. They want to make fairy houses, forts, sandcastles, you name it. They love to make things for the counselors and their parents. We see it over and over again: the more opportunities we make for creativity, the better the day goes, the better our Karate Classes go, and the more likely kids are to make friends, have fun and enjoy everything else we are doing. `They want to play four square and other games and take martial arts classes. Creativity drives positivity.
I am deeply certain that Creativity is an essential life skill, whether you are a professional “creative” or not. You don’t need to be James Cameron or Georgia O’Keefe, Jane Austen or Yo Yo Ma. In fact, having a creative outlet may be even more essential for you if you are not in a “creative” field. I think that Creativity is the essence of who we are. People who regularly creative are going to be better at solving problems, helping other people, staying fit and living life in general. Creativity is going to be at the heart of the Centerpoint Experience this year. I look forward to learning, growing and being inspired together with all of you.