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            You can only be yourself. On the face of it, this seems such a simple truth, but today in any bookstore and increasingly online, you can find hundreds of titles and as many or more people willing to help you be someone else: smarter, bolder, braver, more confident, empowered, and ultimately, successful. In short, you will be a new you, perhaps the you you’ve always desired to be. Then again, maybe you’ll just learn to accept who you are. Would that be so bad?

            Perhaps you see yourself as creative, but you want to be more original. Maybe you have lots of good ideas, but you don’t have the skill to implement them. Maybe you create lots of work, but you’re not so sure of its value or quality. Maybe you have work to show, but you feel intimidated about putting it out there. Maybe you don’t feel confident in talking about the work that you do. Are we beginning to see a pattern here?

            The truth is, many of the greatest artists had doubts about their work or lacked confidence in presenting that work to others. We’re used to thinking about modern angst with painters like Van Gogh, James Ensor, Jackson Pollock, or Mark Rothko. We may know something about the social ineptness of Paul Cezanne or Paul Gauguin, or we might think back to the debauched lifestyle of Caravaggio. What most of these artists did have, though, were the desire to create and the discipline to continue doing so in the face of sometimes daunting odds. And, in spite of whatever personal challenges each may have faced, they created work that transformed the history of painting because they were true to their creative selves.

            A lot of study has been done on creativity. Many attempts have been made to define it, to describe it, and to make guidelines that will either promote it or enhance it. However creativity may be described and whatever suggestions might be made to increase it or make it available when called upon, there is no good answer to where that desire to create comes from. Is it part of some sophisticated survival response that is so specialized it far exceeds its basic function? Is it some higher form of evolution that further separated humans from other animals? Did the complexity of the human brain need something more challenging to fill its capacity for doing? Is it the special touch of the divine as a reminder that we can create to a great degree but never to the level of perfection or to the level of creating life itself?

            We may never know some of these answers, but on a personal level we do know that the creative spark is a wonderful catalyst that propels us into the most intriguing worlds of imaginative revelry and activity. What any one of us feels is unique to us alone – how could we possibly know what another experiences anyway? It is subjective, internal, and though it might be described or shared, it cannot be definitively delineated or fully corroborated. We agree that there is something called creativity, and we can see its results, but I cannot truly know that my experience of creativity is the same as yours. All I can ever know is my own experience and from that, perhaps, deduce that others may experience something similar. My concern is in utilizing and caring for that which is uniquely mine.

            The pundits may continue their punditry, the sophists their sophistry, and the theorists their theories. I will continue to grow according to the design that is me just as you will grow according to the design that is you. Should our paths cross and we exchange information or insight, that may be a good thing, but you cannot grow me any more than I can grow you.