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Every year around this time, tons of articles and TV spots start appearing with all kinds of ideas on how to make your holiday home perfect. If blogs, magazines and television shows are to be believed, it takes nothing but a glue gun and "a little creativity" to transform your home and, heck, even your life into a Rockwellian dream of sugarplum fairies and chestnuts roasting on open fires. I have to admit that I've always found the idea very appealing -- and there were many times in the past that I caught myself saying wistfully, "It's lovely, but I'm just not creative."
I'm just not creative.
I've sort have modified my thinking since then.
I remember the first time I started believing myself to be uncreative: I must have been about ten or eleven, and mentioned to my mother that I thought one day, I might want to be an architect.
"Oh honey," she said, "but you're not artistic. You're not creative. An architect has to be creative. But you're very good at math. You should do something with math."
My mother wasn't trying to be unkind -- it turns out she had data to back her thinking up. Several years later, when I was enrolled in engineering school (I was good at math, after all), my father gave me all my old report cards. One from first grade was particularly telling:
Karen is doing very well in reading and shows a talent for arithmetic, it read, but she shows no aptitude for art.
Well.
It's no wonder, then, that neither I nor my parents ever believed that I had a creative or artistic bone in my body; after all, we'd been conditioned not to believe this. So no one is more surprised than I am that I just released my first book, filled with my own photography, no less. I think my parents are a little bit stunned, as well.
So what happened? Were my parents and my teacher just wrong?
Well, no. And yes.
In my case, my teacher had evaluated my ability to draw something as realistically as possible and assessed that since I couldn't do it to his liking, I wasn't creative or artistic. On one hand, he was right -- I still can't draw a straight line, even with a ruler. But on the other hand, to define artistic or creative ability so narrowly is simply myopic in nature.
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 make 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.
In fact, I'll even take this one step further:
Not only do I believe that we are all creative and artistic, I think it is imperative that we each practice our creativity and art with a certain amount of discipline and regularity. This is not to say, understand, that I think we should all practice our art and creativity in a way that ensures other people see it or critique it -- I think an artistic practice can be a very personal, private undertaking, if that's what makes us comfortable. (For example, I do a lot of art journaling that I share with no one. Perhaps one day, after I'm gone, it will see the light of day.) But I think it's important to form a creative practice and experiment with as many different forms of creativity as we dare, because, and this is important:
Practicing our own ways of self-expression and creativity is how we become confident and secure in our Different. It is one path to owning our beauty.
This month, I want to share with you a conversation I had with my friend Ali Edwards, who makes her living as an artist. Together, we explored what "creativity" means, and here's what she had to say:
See? Ali agrees: Creativity is not just about "high art."
And so, as we end this
