“I believe creativity is our birthright as human beings. Yes, all of us. Creativity is life-changing, and we all deserve that kind of transformation. When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterward. You’re slightly rearranged. Your DNA is still the same, your fingerprints are still the same, you look the same in the mirror, but you aren’t exactly who you were. Be careful, I might tell someone when handing them a book or a record, you will be different after this.
Years spent with art are years spent in cocoon after cocoon after cocoon, always emerging changed.”
while multi-tasking—including multi-thinking—I came across the quote above by Maggie Smith. attention being a finite, fickle thing, I misread it as creative works rearranging your DNA. this sent me on a fun, genetically themed thought experiment before I returned to the words and realised my misreading.
in some whimsical, metaphysical sense, that’s exactly what happens whenever we experience those holiest of collisions: where imagination meets the act of creation to give birth to something new. sometimes it’s someone else’s experience, put out into the world like a library book you get to borrow. sometimes it’s your own innate birthright that bubbles to the surface. either way, whenever our paths cross this “central source of meaning in our lives” (as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to creativity), our meaning-making DNA automatically gets an upgrade.
it reminded me of how choreographer Twyla Tharp, in The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, refers to our creative DNA as “strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations”, influencing the way we see the world and express ourselves, including the mediums we choose.
Tharp lists 33 questions that help form your creative autobiography, covering foundational memory, ambitions, daily habits, role models, and personal responses to adversity, success, and fear:
- What is the first creative moment you remember?
- Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?
- What is the best idea you’ve ever had?
- What made it great in your mind?
- What is the dumbest idea?
- What made it stupid?
- Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea?
- What is your creative ambition?
- What are the obstacles to this ambition?
- What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition?
- How do you begin your day?
- What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat?
- Describe your first successful creative act.
- Describe your second successful creative act.
- Compare them.
- What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play?
- Which artists do you admire most?
- Why are they your role models?
- What do you and your role models have in common?
- Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you?
- Who is your muse?
- Define muse.
- When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond?
- When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond?
- When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond?
- When you work, do you love the process or the result?
- At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp?
- What is your ideal creative activity?
- What is your greatest fear?
- What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening?
- Which of your answers would you most like to change?
- What is your idea of mastery?
- What is your greatest dream?
I first read Tharp’s book in 2015. at the time, I was firmly in the claws of the corporate world. reading it was a cry for help, mixed with an illogically desperate bargain: maybe the mere act of ingesting the words would shield me from losing touch with my creativity in the grey abyss I’d step into each morning. what I didn’t do, probably because I was too afraid of what my answers would imply, was work through those questions.
fast-forward 11 years, and I’m now employed as a full-time self-archaeologist, tracing back in time the things that made me happy, things that made me tick, made me feel, before the working world finally succeeded in sinking its vicious fangs into me long enough to turn me into the creative undead.
since an elephant is best eaten bite by bite, I’m adding these to my question-a-day routine. see ya in 33 days!
#100DaysToOffload/12