What is creativity?

All my professional life, my coworkers have described me as creative. I always demurred because I have the drawing skills of a kindergartener, and I’m a math major for goodness sake! But when I discovered papercrafting I discovered that while I can’t draw or paint anything from scratch, I’m pretty good at taking existing things and making something special. It was then that I realized that the act of creating is something that I’m VERY good at and I was, in fact, doing it all the time at work. Give me  a form, flyer, or process that needs to be (re)invented and I’m a happy camper. Give me transactional work and I want to stab my eyes out from boredom.

Karen Walrond at chookooloonks has a fantastic post about creativity today. Here is just a snippet:

I’ve come to believe that in fact, we’re all creative beings, and we all have the power within us to create art.  The trick, it turns out, is to avoid falling into the trap of believing that art or creativity is limited to the ability to take a pencil and a piece of paper and draw a realistic likeness of something that exists in real life.  Art and creativity can, and should, mean so much more than this.  Art should mean photography.  Writing.  Music.  Cooking.  Building.  Needlework.  Mechanics.

Creativity and art should be defined as the manner in which we are called to express ourselves, in ways that fill us with joy and grace.

Go read the rest of the post – it is fantastic. I’m going to work on the vision board she talks about; please share if you do too.

So if you hear that nagging “I’m not creative” voice in your head, just tell it to be quiet. All you have to do to be creative is to make something. It doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t ever need to share it. That is what this hobby is about to me. Bringing an idea to life. Even if it doesn’t work out the way I thought. Because sometimes it comes out better than I’d imagined. And that brings me joy.