No one can take it away from you.
My daughter was born singing. Not long after she emerged (after a three-day struggle!), as I cradled her in my jittery arms, she opened her perfect, rosebud mouth and a crescendo of notes poured out. Trills and rills and full, round O’s of sound.
She will be thirteen next Friday and she is still making beautiful music. She plays piano and sings at the top of her voice at every opportunity. She’s in love with musicals and can tell you every cast of every show currently playing in the West End and Broadway. One day, more than anything, she wants to be up there, singing too.
Since she was very young, she has taught me about the true meaning of creativity. She sees things that I don’t see. She has a way of describing things in words that makes the world endlessly new to me.
Bent over the little white desk in her bedroom, she is the calm, still centre of a whirl of ideas. They find their way from her heart and brain through her fingers and onto the paper. Smears of bright acrylic, sweeping strokes of watercolour, inky curlicues, glued scraps.
Our creativity is something that we share – she and I – every day. Even when I’m exhausted from meetings and marking, we sit at the dinner table and she tells me all the things she’s been writing, painting, making, thinking, learning. She reminds me, everyday, how important this is. I hope that she will remember this too, in years to come.
We all need creativity. What psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘little c creativity’, the tiny acts and experiments and practices that we do each day. They are the sparks and flickers that catch in the darkness. They are the slowness and sometimes the stillness in all the noise and distraction.
Creativity is, in these challenging times, a place you can go to listen to your own thoughts and feelings, to be your unfettered, uncensored self.
Like so many people right now – and especially young people, those who grew up through a global pandemic – my daughter is often troubled by fears that seem entirely reasonable to me, about what is happening in the world and about how the future might be. What helps her with her worries, more than anything else, is her creative life. I see, over and over again, that finding colour and shape and words for her feelings is a balm.
I know this because it’s the same for me too. When I feel scratchy or niggled or furious or drenched in sorrow, the rhythmic movement of my pen over the page or my fingers over the keyboard has soothed me more times than I care to think about.
The small private act of making something – something real, with our hands, our words, our paint, our breath, out of all those vague and slippery feelings – helps us to feel a little less powerless in the face of events that we can’t control. Moving a line or a phrase around in white space, drawing an outline, deleting and rewriting, rubbing out and resketching, gives us a sense of agency and purpose. It helps us to mould meaning out of all the chaos.
Here’s to our private, everyday creative practice – yours and mine, together – whether that is writing or painting or singing or walking or cooking or watching the clouds.
Feel your feet on the earth. Sing at the top of your voice. Crack out that box of coloured pencils. Reach for the stickers and the sparkles.
Don’t let anyone stop you.
