It's not all about the cupcakes
Looking for God in all the wrong places
Over the weekend, my neighbour asked me about creativity workshops. “Oh” she said, obviously surprised by my answer, “I thought it would involve things like decorating cupcakes”.
A popular misconception about creativity is that it’s something you do in your spare time as a hobby, or after you have retired from ‘real work’.
There are two things wrong with this.
1. That it’s a ‘doing’ thing rather than a ‘thinking’ thing.
2. That it’s an indulgence rather than a necessity.
In the modern age, we’ve become obsessed with productivity. “What do you do?” is often the first question we ask people to establish some form of connection. Just as “Did you do anything nice at the weekend?” Is usually the first question people ask on a Monday morning.
We do earnest things all week then we reward ourselves with more pleasant but equally productive doings at the weekend.
In this scenario, creativity is an exalted form of doing, when in reality, it is an exalted form of thinking.
The difference between humans and animals is that humans can imagine new things, whereas animals have to live in “pattern-repeat” mode – doing whatever their ancestors did to guarantee survival.
Evolution endowed humans with a creative spirit, but we misuse our gift of imagination. We imagine worst-case scenarios, both in the outside world, and the inside one. We imagine we are powerless, flawed, and inadequate. This allows a few humans at the top of the food chain to capitalise on this fear and use it as a marketing opportunity to sell us all kinds of stuff we don’t need.
Only a wake-up call to the creative spirit can change this reality.
Sometime in the past we took the word spirit, turned it into spiritual then turned spirituality into religion, guaranteeing that we would live in the “pattern-repeat” of our ancestors - following rules to guarantee our survival (if not in this world, then the next one).
But what if the word Spirit had been turned into Spirited? What if God didn’t care whether people were good or bad, but wanted them to be spirited.
A spirited child is often seen as a naughty child, one that needs containing, or disciplining. But without the judgement, it just means they have a lot of energy. If we’ve been raised to fear chaos, that kind of energy can seem scary.
True creativity (as opposed to the safe creativity of arts and crafts) doesn’t come from inside our “pattern repeat” brain, it comes from the realm of infinite possibility, aka chaos.
You can’t manage or contain chaos, but you can learn to flow with it, co-exist with it, and co-create with it.
Cake making is a great example of contained creativity – creativity is the little bit of “you” that gets added… after you’ve followed the rules of the cake recipe. It’s in the details, the little flourishes, the icing on top of an old idea. But as we know, it’s the Devil that lives in the details, God lives in a far more expansive place.
The definition of Spirited is… Full of energy, enthusiasm, and determination.
What could we collectively generate if we had that running through our veins? What world problems could we solve? What new realities could we create?
Something a lot more interesting than cupcakes.
I’m doing a course “From Fear to Flow” on Zoom - four Sundays in May. $190/£150 DM me for details.