The Tragedy Of Growing Up

As we enter into this Thanksgiving holiday weekend I'd like you to glance around, and see that almost everything surrounding you has been invented or designed by someone else, some person at some time engaged in a creative act, and the sum total of those acts makes up the world you life in.

This applies not only to your physical environment but also to your mental one, your mind is filled almost entirely by symbols originally formed by creative people.

Consider what these creative products are made from. Very simple things; things that existed in nature, now combined into new patterns. The chair you sit in did not exist in the tree from which the material came but in the mind of a creative person who conceived and designed it.

And so with the desk or table, the rug on the floor, the draperies in the windows, the very floor and walls and ceiling that surround you. All are patterns formed by creative people who found new combinations for quite simple and ordinary things.

When you look at creative people, the question is not, "Why do some people appear to be creative, while others are not?" but, rather, "Why is it that some people do not use their creative ability that each of us has been born with, while other do not?"

Men and women stand at the wave front of a phase of an ongoing process, the constant and creative modification of environment, that has been going on since living things first moved upon the earth. Alone of all these creatures, we are aware that we are part of a process and, thus, can consciously direct it.

Creativity is a state of mind, and it is most widely expressed by children, because their confrontation with their environment is constantly made up of original discoveries and inventions. In time, through social pressures to conform and the repetition of experience, most of them lose this sense of wonder and become less and less creative, trapped in a concrete mold not of their own making.

It has been said that the creative person is essentially a "perpetual child." The tragedy is that most of us grow up.