You are Creative
For most of my life I considered myself not a creative person. I wanted to do programming (despite being pretty damn bad at math), and I never really felt like I could just ‘come up with stuff’. However, that self-perception disappeared a bit more than two years ago, when I gave creative writing a shot. And now I realize that no one can ‘come up with stuff’.
Ever since I started writing people started telling me: “Oh, you’re so creative.” “How do you come up with this stuff?” etc. But that’s the thing, I don’t come up with anything. Everything that I have ever written was inspired by something or someone. There are no innate ideas in my mind that I (or anyone) bestow upon the world. I just recite the thoughts and lessons of people much smarter and much greater than me in my own way.
And now we can safely arrive at this idea: no one comes up with anything. There is no ‘creative mind’ that just comes up with stuff. We take in everything around us, everything before us, and we maybe shift it or combine it in weird ways, and then we get something ‘new’. I put that in quotes, because it’s not new, it’s old ideas recited and revised in a different way.
But now let’s think about this: If we produce our ideas by taking in the ideas of the past, then who started this chain of ideas? There had to have been at least one person, ‘The Creative Mind’, who actually just came up with something, on their own, right? Wrong.
Anything and everything ever produced by humankind, be it art or technology, is inspired by one thing and one thing only. The human experience. That’s where we all ‘creative’ and ‘logical’ minds draw our ideas from. I believe this distinction between creative people and logical people to be silly. Humans by nature are creative. After all, we all create something during our lifetime.
Most of my life I felt that there was a distinction between logical thinkers and creative thinkers. Looking back now, I think it’s an incorrect distinction to make. The mind is a whole, and creativity is closely connected to logic. One is simply irrelevant without the other. There is no logic without creativity, there is no creativity without logic. Philosophy studies the very nature of human existence and the human mind. Philosophers need to be creative to create new ideas, but they need to be logical to defend said ideas.
So, the title is actually a lie, you’re not creative, neither are you logical. You are human. Don’t try to limit that infinite mind of yours to being either logical or creative. It will break out anyways.
