Just For Me
We are born into a world of creativity. From our first breath we are baptized into a world of color, light, sound, and sentiments. Our lives are filled with stimuli that is said to promote our well being, our minds development and cognitive skills that are a much needed attribute to process life as we live. Our first visions are of color, our first words are imitations of those around us, our first sentiments are learned from our comforts, or lacks thereof, and the responses to all those are taught to us during those moments in early learning. Our minds become the data processors of the world we’re exposed to and the meanings our influences give them. We become storage banks of emotional responses whether they’re good or not. We reflect the teachings of all our life lessons learned as we traveled through each stage of our development into a person whose life is a sum of all its parts.
From first books where drawings were etched in soft color with short rhyming words, to textbooks that examples the differences between apples and oranges, and craft projects we learn at both home and day cares we are told and expected to accept creativity. Our home’s senior members are often a television who houses generations of friends and families across a generation; there to share the weather, a ball game, a story about a colorful kingdom full of animals and dancing festivals. Elves that make cookies, Santa Claus who loves to eat them, and goodness that protects our friends and our self. We learn as we grow and before we all know, we’re teenagers who see the world through innocent eyes. Looking at adults wondering how they come up with such things as scientific formulas when all we can manage is our wardrobe and daily routines. Some of us were book readers, magazine lookers, encyclopedia searchers who turned into computer, cell phone browsers still impressed by the amount of creativity that is put into our world via others creative genius. Knowing we’ll never super cede them or impede them; and yet creativity is still a part of who we are. It has been our lives in every way imaginable; think coloring books and crayons, think puzzles and school assignments, think decorating a first apartment, think cooking or dressing, or think nothing at all. Turn on your radio find every channel that makes a sound, it’s there asking you to listen. Grab a remote control turn on a television set, everyone who wants to be seen is there, telling you a story, walking in the rain, plowing through snow, playing a ball game. All of them wanting your attention. Wanting to share a few moments of your life unfolding their ideas of creativity. It’s late night you’ve already eaten yet here’s a commercial reminding you that yeah, you like the food of the creative advertisement and the skit of the characters remind you that you enjoyed the laugh they provided as a reminder. And all the while you accept it for what it is, life. Being alive surrounded by a million ideas at any given time from the creative minds of the world.
Then you pick up a pencil and doodle lines on a page, or take out your cell phone for a photo of a skyline, or download a game that’s full of sounds, sights, and colors, or open a format to write down an idea and in those moments become a part of the creative. No where close to the level of those who have consistently designed and redesigned their processes over the years yet in your own way begin to express a part of the world as it is. A wonderfully create full place where words are everywhere you are, colors speak to your imagination in ways you can’t explain, and no one would really understand even if you explained.
Others want to determine those ideas for you, others want to dismiss the validity of your own learning, yet in a lifetime full of moments where only you were the entire processor, you don’t quite understand their ways. After all, every idea has many a meaning and every individual is exposed to it differently and the grand design of a life is filled with more influences than can possibly be remembered later in any great detail often needing others who shared the experiences to remind you. Remember a book title, the characters, the theme, the plot, the conflict, the resolution, the writer, the date, the time, the place where you read it; now remember you were only seven when you read it. Or maybe you were twenty, oh wait, no thirty, you were thirty and someone gave you the book and, wait did you read that or watch the movie?
Such as it is, it’s still a life full of creative thinkers thinking for you in a sense, shaping the atmosphere in which you will grow, what you will be exposed to, when it should be exposed to you and the appropriate rate of exposure. All the while insisting that you must learn to accept them for what they are, what they do, what they say, what they teach you, what they can prove, what they can deny, what they will deny, what is fantasy, what is reality, what foods to eat, what foods you shouldn’t, what should be believed, what shouldn’t be accepted, what life should be, what life shouldn’t and a million different themes in between. All of it creatively prepared and projected as a normal day, a normal routine, a normal way of being alive on the earth on every given day. Think of it this way, is a car really sexy? Must we be shown a special sequence of photographic images to promote a sleek, thin, molding applied to a bumper in order for us to want to buy a car. Yet creatively they lower the lights, setting the mood, turn on some tunes, oh yeah that’s smooth, add a handsome face, then oh baby a voice, talking you into a frame of mind, about how the plushness of it feels, and the perfect fit all combines into a pure pleasure of machine and how it could be yours, if.
Yeah, I guess that is much more creative than sitting around on a computer fulfilling the need to put something into context that my own mind has understood for years without saying. The simple basic act of illuminating my own life with something, sort of creative, such as writing a few paragraphs about all the creative wonders in the world. Knowing I could never measure up to such standards, understanding that I was never supposed to. But then again with all the creativity there is in this world and all the ways we’re taught to accept it as a part of life, there’s no wonder I would be attracted to doing such a thing either. Even if it is just for me.
Jade Jaspers
