The creativity of here

by Gareth Coetzee

Account Executive/ Writer

Yesterday, I climbed a tree. And then, I climbed another. After that I traversed a fallen log, jumped from it over a stump, landed and dive-rolled. Then I went to the park down the street from where I live. I climbed another tree. Did pull ups in the high branches. I hung from other branches, jumped down. I crawled under a bench and then hurdled over it again from the other side. I did handstands and cart wheels. I jumped from rock to rock near a pond. And regardless of people staring, I continued to look for little obstacles to conquer. Worked up quite a sweat in that way and later found a few scrapes and bruises. But I felt fulfilled. I felt young and uninhibited. Playful. Free. Engaged. Creative. Organic.

Now, this is not a post about some alternative fitness activities – though there are many to choose from. But this is actually a post about creativity.

As a writer I find creativity to be this elusive being that I’m constantly trying to coax into doing my bidding. It is a deep well that is mostly empty until some surge of underground water fills it again. It is an energy that is like a hummingbird hovering just above the flower – or am I the hummingbird struggling to get the nectar? Either way, creativity is not like the internet, where a connection to it is ensured as long as I’ve paid for bandwidth.

But yesterday, while running like a mad person – and I’m sure many onlookers thought of me as such - looking for fun activities to do I came to the realisation that creativity, coming out of a state of play, is nothing but active freedom.

What the heck could that mean? Active freedom? Think about it. The last time you were creative and felt really creative and there were tangible results for that burst of creativity, had you not in some way cast the shackles of your cares and fears aside? Did you not seek to unbind your mind from its rigid patterns? Were you not in the mood for reworking the fabric of things? Was it not a rebellion?

I would bet money on the fact that it was.

In the park, and I must be clear about not being in a gym with predefined ways of working muscles and lungs, I was forced in a way to make new things out of ordinary things, to find new ways of using things, of seeing things, and what they could do for me. But I also had to find new ways of moving, of using my limbs and my energy and my eyes. I suppose that is why they say that to be truly creative is to be like a child again, looking at things anew, allowing them, simple objects, to have multiple lives, characters, possibilities, allowing one’s self the same lot.

Creativity is a rebellion against boredom, against mediocrity, against fear, against sleepwalking, against rigidity, against complacence.

Creativity is a struggle for meaning, a struggle for beauty, a struggle for purpose, a struggle for youth, a struggle for vitality, for truth, for freedom.

The Roman’s used to say creativity came from a sort of being that would sit in your walls, called a ‘Genius’. The Greeks had a similar belief, in some spirit of unknown origin called a Daemon. And sometimes it feels like that; as if creativity were a being channelling its energy through you to somehow validate its existence.

But now I am beginning to think that creativity was always going to be a part of the human, enabling this miniscule speck in the greater universe to somehow vibrate in such a way as to remind God that, “Hey I’m over here, and I’m glad I’m here, because here, is awesome.”