An Ant Hill is a masterpiece of nature. Hidden from the human eye it grows intricate, complex and deep. It’s a beautiful structure crafted by one of the most humble creatures. But in the world of Colosseums and Eiffel’s tower it is generally overlooked. How do we define creativity in such a context? Is creativity about grandeur and sublime beauty? Or it’s about incremental slight of hands spread across generations?
Does every painting need to project the emotions like the Monalisa or represent the raw beauty of nature as in a Van Gogh’s? It’s a common conception that being creative is unnatural in humans and people like Mozart or Bach are freaks of nature. The task of being creative seems daunting for most of us. Masters say that creativity happens when you let the river in your heart meet the ocean in your mind. If it’s all in our minds and there is nothing biological which impedes creativity, why is that so few of us can actually be creative ?
The answer lies in the perception of creativity. A creative idea or art is hardly conceived so unless it can be measured on a scale. Is it grand? Is it useful? Is it complex? And, Is it beautiful? Any of such ideas are executed with great perseverance of it’s practitioners over a long period of time. Another observation here is that it seems to us that the practitioners always seem to have a final goal to achieve. In such a world an Ant-Hill might be complex and intricate but it has no final goal. It spreads without a plan.
Though it might seem to us that all creative things have a grand plan behind them, it’s hardly true in nature. The most creative camouflage techniques of organisms have come into place through trials and errors over millions and millions of years of random evolution. Creativity in nature has never tried to be efficient, beautiful, grand or even useful.
For those of us who have a hard time being creative, it’s important to understand that creativity is any physical stimuli (grand or ordinary) our mind executes in response to fresh sprouts of ideas which spring up in our fertile minds. Creativity is as much about the epitome of beauty as it’s about the epitome of labor. Creativity is not only about creating Taj Mahal’s but is also about creating ant-hills.
This post first appeared on my personal blog