Creativity

Creativity is the capacity to solve problems. It isn’t a rare gift for a few ‘geniuses’; it’s a basic human capacity used every day. Whenever we combine words in a new way, improvise a game, fix something, or reframe a difficulty, we’re being creative. Children show this most clearly: the freedom to think, make, speak, and play is a core human trait.

Creation was once reserved for God; humans were said to make or imitate, not create. The verb to create enters English from Latin creāre (“bring forth, beget, cause to grow”), but the noun ‘creativity’ only really spreads in the 19th century. Western culture began to build the figure of the creative genius; Renaissance writers such as Vasari single out artists like Michelangelo as almost divine exceptions. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Goethe is cast as the model of the original, self-forming genius in German letters, and Shakespeare—through 18th-century bardolatry and early 19th-century biography and criticism—is transformed into the English national genius. We have incorrectly subscribed to the myth of the isolated, world-making creator, which tends to obscure the everyday creativity of ordinary lives.

Creativity is not a rare gift and not the private property of artists. It is the ordinary competence of living systems: the capacity to generate variation, test it against constraint, and stabilise what works. Every day we create the world we can inhabit—by selecting what matters, by holding a pattern long enough to act, and by loosening it again when reality changes. But this is never a smooth, frictionless process. Life is built on conflict: between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the animal and the ordered, appetite and discipline, dissolution and form. We do not escape that tension; we live inside it. The created self is the momentary settlement of this struggle: the current archive of meanings, habits, memories, and assumptions—an achieved coherence, always provisional. The creative self is the metabolising capacity that keeps the archive alive: the ability to widen, to play, to take in what is new, and to re-make the self–world fit without collapsing into rigidity on the one hand or chaos on the other.

Fluid presence is the trained experience of that metastable poise: not passivity, but a kind of active steadiness that can hold opposites in view long enough for something third to emerge. It is attention that can stay with what has been created—forms, habits, structures, relationships, institutions—without fetishising them; and it can stay with the animal energies that press against those forms without idealising them. In that state, a person has access to multiple registers of creativity: framing, reframing, framing again—shifting scale, shifting time-horizon, shifting standpoint—until the situation becomes workable. Creativity, in this sense, is not an aesthetic category but a human universal—expressed in perception, movement, care, conversation, craft, design, and governance. It is not merely adaptive; it is intrinsically satisfying, because to live well is to participate consciously in the continual making and remaking of the world.