Sometimes in order to better understand creativity we have to bring it down to earth.  One of the main barriers to understanding our creativity is the mistaken belief that we are not creative people, so I would like for us to examine creativity as it appears in an ordinary, day-to-day fashion.  To be sure, there are more glorious forms of creativity, but understanding the most dramatic aspects of creativity depends on having a firm basis of creativity in more humble and ordinary circumstances.  We are better able to appreciate those who are creative when we understand how pervasive creativity is in our world.  To help further along that understanding, I would like to focus briefly on two examples of quotidian creativity that may not seem to be that dramatic at first but which set the context for how creativity is developed among people, and how it is that ordinary people can find a great deal of comfort and benefit in their lives through the practice of creativity.

The first example of ordinary creativity I would like to focus on is that of my mother when I was growing up as a child.  Without going into too much detail, during most of my childhood and the first part of my teen years, my mother was single and raising two sons–namely my younger brother and I.  While earning a modest wage as a secretary, she was responsible for paying for rent, transportation, food, and clothing for two growing boys on very limited means.  I remember when I was twelve years or so asking her about food expenses and she showed me how much money she had to work with on a monthly basis, and the expenses that she had for rent ($300 for a single-wide trailer in the country), gasoline and so on.  Looking at the numbers, I saw that the budgeting was very tight, and that the child support my mother received from my father, about $250 a month or so in total, was generally devoted to the food budget with very little left over.  And it was in food where my mother showed herself to be most creative.

While my maternal grandmother was a creative person when it came to food and clothing (she sewed and stitched with excellence, and had a large set of tasty recipes), my mother’s creativity was in dealing with tight constraints.  Over the years of my childhood, I watched my mother purchase food in bulk (pasta and rice, for example), avidly shop for deals when it came to meat, and use crock pots to her advantage when it came to providing a mix of foods that did not require a great deal of time to prepare after she was finished with work.  While to this day I cannot bear to eat tuna noodle casserole because of how commonly it was served when I was a kid, I still enjoy eating pasta in various forms and also have a fondness for crock-pot cooking that is simple, hearty, and tasty.  What were the sorts of constraints my mother was under?  For one, she had little money, which greatly limited both the amount and the variety of food she had available to cook with.  For another, she had limited time, since she worked full time and since it was some years before my mother had a great deal of help from my brother and I when it came to our own contributions to creativity in recipes.  By the time I was a pre-teen and a teenager I was fond of cooking pasta for myself, which lowered the burden on my mother at least a little, but for several years my mother had the stressful task of cooking for two hungry and somewhat picky children (I was especially picky) on a low budget.

Despite the fact that I do not like tuna noodle casserole, I must admit that overall I was quite impressed by my mother’s creativity overall.  This was especially evident when it came to dealing with turkey on Thanksgiving.  On Thanksgiving, my family would go for the dark meat first, since we all had a preference for leg and thigh meat.  By Friday, we were working on a great deal of the white meat that can be found in a turkey breast.  For dinner on Sabbath we would eat leftover turkey in sandwiches, and by Sunday afternoon the rest of the meat that we had not finished was being put in a homemade turkey noodle soup.  We got four or five days worth of food, tasty and filling, out of a single bird, and nothing from it was wasted.  Nor was this an untypical approach.  From my mother I learned the importance of being able to repurpose food items to keep one’s diet more varied and also the importance of being alert to tasty dishes that could be made with limited amounts of time and attention.  I also learned as a child that I was a person whose tastes were fairly simple, all of which meant that I didn’t have to keep as much food around to enjoy what I was eating on a regular basis.  From a small amount of items one can create a large amount of tasty food, if one knows how to do it.  And knowing how to do it and doing it amounts to an ordinary but vital aspect of creativity.

Even if being a single parent of little disposable income puts a lot of constraints on one’s cooking, it may frequently be the case that such a parent’s cooking may still be far too creative for one’s fussy and picky offspring.  Children are not known for having a very wide palette, and are quite content with eating the same small set of foods over and over again.  Even to this day I am quite content to eat tacos once or twice a week, eat chicken parmesan another time or two a week, and to supplement the rest of my eating with large amounts of salads, fried chicken, other rice or pasta dishes, and the occasional lamb or other more exotic cut of meat along with tasty vegetables.  As a child my eating habits were even more narrowly defined.  A parent who is able to cook up peanut soup with chicken, for example, may be able to do so on a very reasonable budget (and it is a very tasty dish when made well), but such creativity even under heavy constraints may be far more ambitious than children are willing to try and the concern with what food would be wasted has to be kept in mind when one’s budget and margin for error are small.  Let us mourn in passing for the sad fate of my mother’s efforts to make chicken cacciatore when I was a child, only to find out that I hated eating tomatoes in a non marinara fashion (something which is still true, to the humor of those who serve me food and who eat with me).  Ah, the sweet memories of creativity past.

Another example of quotidian creativity is something that we may likewise witness without thinking much about it, and that is the creativity of bright and articulate and imaginative children.  I have a dear young friend, for example, who has created an entire lore that views me as a Nathan tree.  According to this lore, which she has invented, the Nathan tree has branches that are convenient for climbing, which she tests by climbing up and swinging off of my arms as if they were sturdy tree branches.  She asks if I have any ice cream or cotton candy, which she imagines is represented by the fuzz on top of my male pattern-balding head, and considers the Nathan tree to make the ice cream or candy by virtue of eating bad people and turning them into tasty dessert items.  So, not only is the Nathan tree a home to friendly squirrels and other small woodlands animals, and a patient tree when it comes to swinging by friendly children, but it is also a carnivorous tree that executes judgment on the unworthy.  There is clearly a lot that is going on here, as the tree presents one face that is friendly and patient and gentle, especially towards children and small and cute animals and another face that is extremely tough-minded and even brutal in the destruction of the wicked.  I would like to think that this is an immensely shrewd and insightful judgment of my own complex character, but it came thanks to the imagination of a child.

I am sure that you, dear reader, have plenty of examples of such imaginative narratives from the little ones who are around you.  It has been my own experience, at least, that children are full of creative stories and that there is a great degree of willingness on the part of children to give free voice to their imaginative and creative play by which ordinary people and places are turned into much more mysterious and exciting ones.  The nearly universal love of playacting that I have seen among the small children around me, their love of costumes and inventing titles for themselves and in imaginatively acting as if they were some sort of real or mythical creature is evidence that there is an innate capability on the part of children who are very young in being able to visualize and act in ways that are very distinct from their own ordinary existence.  And when they realize that they are dealing with bigger people who are even merely tolerant and indulgent with this sort of play, they are happy to include these bigger people in their imaginative stories.  At times, especially if a child has a particularly difficult existence, the ability to imagine oneself as being a different sort of being in a different and better sort of existence can be of great help in providing the resilience that is required to live a better life than one has experienced so far, and to be able to rise above one’s circumstances.  At times we can use the resources of imagination to make our actual ordinary lives better ones, and those opportunities are ones that we must appreciate as being small examples of the miraculous creativity that can enrich even the most constrained and oppressed life.

Let us close this brief examination with one more small example of quotidian creativity.  Today we celebrate the writings of Jane Austen, a novelist who during her lifetime (an all too brief one that barely lasted 40 years) wrote six mature novels that were centered on marriage plots in the world of the gentry.  Austen herself never married and had only a couple of opportunities for relationships, neither of which ended up working out.  Despite living in a very constrained existence in which she did not have a room of her own (she shared a bedroom, even as an adult, with her older sister Cassandra, who had been engaged to be married but whose fiance died of disease in an ill-advised imperial venture in the Caribbean and who had no other chance at marriage), Jane managed to create vivid narratives of worthwhile and intelligent young women, some of them from humble backgrounds, who were able to attract marriage partners of financial and moral and intellectual worth.  We may view this as wish fulfillment for a provincial spinster of limited means whose novels gave her an average income of 50£ a year during her adult life.  But it was intensely creative work, and people to this day are still creating works of their own either in adaptation of her novels or in extension of them.  Her imagination provided her and many millions of readers a great deal of comfort and at least the temporary escape from what is often a lonely and oppressive existence, and that is reason enough to appreciate the sort of ordinary creativity that leads one to move from being a storyteller in one’s youth to being a novelist whose works are long remembered, read, and appreciated by others, and a spur to their own creativity and imaginative capacity.