Creativity and other things not to be blamed for

Nobody ever told us that it is good

Brian Aldiss was born in the middle of a warm day exactly between WWI and WWII in East Dereham, a cloudy town in Norfolk United Kingdom. He is a well known writer, especially as far as science fiction and short stories are concerned. In 1990, my birth year, he wrote these words

“Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem”

He was 65 when the day he was writing this sentence. If you are 65 it is very likely that you saw and went through many problems and found a number of solutions, if you are 65 and produce this phrase it means that you really mean it, it means that it is probably the truth.
I found very stunning to hear the word “creativity” pronounced by someone who is not that young anymore. Old people tend to speak about the past, the places they saw, the people they met. This is not something to blame them for, it is like when you just have finished to watch a movie and you cannot stop talking about what you saw on the screen.

I think that there is this common mistake, to think about creativity as something related to art, something that is good and positive, but not necessary in order to make necessary things. This is one of the biggest matters of the society of nowadays in my opinion, only few people realize that creativity is the only way that lets a problem to be solved. Creativity is the effort to “create something that has never been there before”, it is therefore not just a way to solve problems, it is a tool that reduces the probability of the inception of new ones.
I am Italian and I am deeply confident in the fact creativity has always been what saved us from situation which seemed impossible to overcome, our people live between moments of complete delight and others of disenchantment and crisis of values. The point is that nobody ever told us that is to be creative that allowed and still allows us to come out from the swamp and this lack of knowledge is truly dangerous as we do not consider creativity as an effective tool. Sometimes it is even considered something bad, as it is strictly linked to curiosity.

When I was 4 years old I used to spend my days at a preschool which was managed by nuns. I was often told what to do and, especially, what not to do but it was normal, they found natural to scold children in order to educate them. The reproach I received the most was “Don’t be curious!” Curiosity was seen as something deplorable and so I grew up with a negative concept of curiosity which I changed only with my own experience, years and years after. What I am trying to point out is that it often happens that we consider bad something which in reality is good just because someone told us it is bad, like in my case about the curiosity. A very similar thing happened to curiosity in my country, sometimes we have been told that it is not good at all, sometimes we have not been told how useful it can be, always.

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail” (Edwin Land)

It does not really matter if you are an old writer living in Southeast of England or a 4 years old child who asks to a nun what there is under her headdress, all that counts is that you have not to feel guilty for your curiosity and the creativity which derives from the curiosity itself. All your brain can create comes from only the will to create it.