In the late 1800s, during the machine age, a set of manufactured porch spindles were purchased, a thing of beauty in their uniformity. They served their purpose well on a house built with a large front porch where a family could sit on hot summer nights to seek a cooling breeze. Oh, to know what the spindles learned about the people living there during the century that this house offered sanctuary.
But progress came. And, the old house was torn down to make room for a ever growing town. However, along with much of the wood from the house, the spindles were saved. Most of the wood was put to use building another dwelling, but some of the spindles remained stored for future use.
Then one day, the man, who had torn down the one house and used the wood to build another, pulled out those matching heart pine spindles. Now a grandfather, he sanded off the years of paint (probably lead base), added a base, hand-fashioned a hole in the top of the surviving spindles and converted them into two-foot tall candle holders. Finding 1-1/2 inch candles to fit the holes proved more difficult than crafting the holders in the first place. As he saw his adult children, he gave each of them a pair of the new candlesticks made out of century-old porch spindles and he kept two pair.
Giving new life, new purpose, to something old and worn-out represents creativity at its best.
Not all fathers are into woodworking, but fatherhood itself demands that men shape new lives into meaningful ones, even a greater challenge for creative skills. I appreciate that more and more of today’s young fathers now take an active role in raising their children. The young must benefit from hands-on oversight by both parents.
Whenever a parent helps his children to fulfill their potential, he puts forth a new kind of creativity because each generation comes with new uncertainties. While universal truths remain true, the world in which we live changes constantly.
Psychologist Thomas Ward of Texas A&M explains, “We are an enormously creative species. In a relatively short span of time, geologically speaking, we have gone from fashioning rocks into our first primitive tools to building spacecraft that allows us to retrieve rocks from other planets. The hallmark of human thinking is creativity.”
The caveman faced different trials than later generations for survival, but once he invented the wheel, his descendants not only used it, they also began to refine it. They sought ways to incorporate this marvelous invention into bigger and better concepts. Always with each new invention, the demands for improvement on the next generation increase.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” says Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master and author as quoted by Rebecca Lawton, author of Reading Water: Lessons from the River, in an interview in the July/August 2006 issue of More Magazine.
And thus, it’s not enough for parents just to be creative in guiding their young. They must also assist the next generation in discovering its own ways of crafting the new. Creativity is so important not only to an individual’s well being, but also to that of society.
Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson says, “Creativity allows humans to survive.”
In their book Why Good Things Happen to Good People, Stephen Post, PhD and Jill Neimark, journalist, add, “Creative people take twice as long to study their surroundings with an ever renewed interest in whatever happens around them...There is pure, visceral pleasure in creativity, no matter how small. The reward comes from within...Creativity can heal us physically and emotionally...”
2008
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