Agents of Creativity
Doing anything worthwhile is hard. The rollercoaster of hope and frustration twists and turns at a dizzying pace. Yet, growth feels so slow that we rarely notice it as it happens. Only in hindsight do we see how far we’ve come. Fixated on day-to-day challenges, we often forget to step back and see the larger picture.
Yet, if we pause and separate ourselves from this personal fixation, it becomes clear that our growth in our respective choosing is not an isolated event. It is part of something much larger than the person. That each person is like a cell in the body of this larger being called humanity. Each person appears for a brief while, contributes to the functioning and development of this being, and disappears.
In arts, for example, the frustrations you and I face are not qualitatively different from those endured by Rembrandt or Van Gogh. The criticisms directed at Monet and Picasso paved the way for us to experiment in ways unimaginable only a century ago. A figurative artist today may not draw a direct link but her impulse to paint the human figure, is inextricably linked with Da Vinci’s obsession that led him to dissect human bodies. Even a modern artist who identifies as a purely spontaneous abstract painter still creates within a lineage, for without realism, abstraction has no meaning.
Holding this perspective in the background of our awareness is transformational. We cease to see ourselves as solitary strugglers, desperately seeking an original voice in fear of being lost in the ocean of attention seekers. Instead, we come to recognize ourselves as agents of a primordial urge to create — the same urge that moved our ancestors to draw on cave walls, and that has been experimenting for millennia in ever-new ways of astonishing itself.
Today, no matter what our undertaking, we carry the baton passed down through countless generations. For a brief while, we bear the honor of being the flagbearers of a tradition far greater than any individual. For a while longer, we get to play and be frustrated, to experiment and be delighted, to create and be amazed, and in the process, inadvertently serve this impersonal impulse that we come from, serve, and return to.