Creativity in Adults:
What is it, What it could be

Every adult, whatever his or her roles in life, gives thought at some time to whether he or she is "creative'--and in what, and in what degree. All 'experimenters'!---from the very young business- or working man trying privately to make up a new song on his guitar to the middle-aged amateur gardener contemplating new flower-bed arrangements and plants, to the lonely widow trying her hand for the first time with oil paints--encounter the question: "How creative am P'

This special fascination with the concept of creativity results from its identification with personal uniqueness. Each of us is a unique being: unique because of our genes, and unique because of the nature of our millions of psychosocial intersections during our lifetime (even if we were cloned, the clones would have different experiences and reactions). No one who has appeared before us or will appear after us will be exactly us; and this is made more striking when you consider that every day of the thousands of days of our life is also in certain ways unique. Yet this conviction of personal uniqueness can be dimmed and lost in the course of the life drama; that is why the subject of creativity is so important for us to explore.

If you ask, as I have frequently asked in my public university seminars, a large group of adults of all ages and many backgrounds and vocations what they conceive "creativity" or "the creative process" to be, the richness of the returns after only a quarter-hour for reflection is striking. I now have hundreds of these definitions, and I cite a few chosen for their being representative of different approaches.

"Creativity" or "the creative process" is seen as:

The application of imaginative innovation to any activity.

Releasing the mind to new approaches and methods of problemsolving.

Expanding one's perception. Awareness.

Generating new ideas.

Inner expression evolving from environment and hereditary characteristics, after a period of germination, combining motivation and desire.

Creativity is the actuality of being.

Creativity denotes openness to growth in all its dimensions; the ability to freely play with a large number of options; to remain open to being surprised, to surprising oneself.

My life is a creative process. We are all unfolding creatively or destructively. Creativity is the ability to draw from our outside experiences and mix these with the right amount of our inner feelings and subconscious lucidness to execute something totally wonderful and unexpected.

Seeing possibilities in all things and all people. Turning potential disaster into success. Playful thinking, playing with words, ideas.

A mysterious process whereby experience, knowledge, the resources of the unconscious, and a high degree of desire to achieve a particular end, suddenly culminate in a satisfactory, possibly unique result.

It must be emphasized that these definitions, chosen from many equally stimulating, were produced upon immediate request, without notice, from men and women of all ages and occupations who had appeared for their first class in a creativity-learning seminar. It is extremely interesting to compare them with definitions produced by some of the noted theorists on the creative process and how it works.

Thus, to Alex Osborn, creativity is "applied imagination"; to George Stoddard, "the urge to invent, to inquire, to perform." To Carl Rogers, it means facilitating "the emergence in action of a novel product, growing out of the~uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on the other hand. " Rogers felt that creativity meant delivering an actual product, though that product might be so unusual as reforming one's own personality through psychotherapy. Dorothy Sayers disagreed: you could be a poet without writing a poem! And Eric Fromm's numerous perceptions on creativity include the striking observation: "Creativity is the ability to see (or to be -aware), and to respond."

The two roles in creativity of doing and being also turn up in Abraham Maslow's descriptions of "special talent creativity"-the creativity of the gifted inventor, scientist, poet, sculptor, architect, novelist, and so on; and then of "self-actualising creativeness," which he saw as being creative changes in the personality, and in the capacity to do anything creatively-that is, to live creatively.

One notable conference on creativity and its facilitation invited its numerous gurus to provide their personal definitions and the result was a shower of the characteristics of creative people, including: capacity to be puzzled; awareness; spontaneity;* (*Silvani Arieti, in his fine study, Creativity, the Magic Synthesis, differentiates well between spontaneity and actual creativity. He seems to present a more difficult case in differentiating between originality and creativity!) spontaneous flexibility; divergent thinking; openness to new experiences; disregard of boundaries; abandoning; letting go; being born every day; ability to toy with the elements; relish for temporary chaos (i.e., rigid order as the enemy of the creative process); and tolerance of ambiguity (able to play with various options.*) (*Superscript numerals refer to Chapter Notes, beginning on page 220.)

From this galaxy of concepts of creativity, both from private people and from noted theorists of the art, you can test or enhance your own personal working definition of the creative process, its demands, and its products. My own definition, to add simply one more, is as follows:

Creativity is the process by which a man or woman employs both the conscious and the unconscious domains of the mind to combine various existing materials into fresh constructions or configurations. These, in some degree, cause significant changes in the self-system of the person concerned, or significantly alter the environment surrounding him or her, whether such a change is great or small.

However, fascinating though the definition of "creativity" clearly is to many adults, there are other questions about it that grip the seekeradult as he or she proceeds through the middle and later years. For example: Is creativity a universal human quality or a kind of divine fire found burning only in a minority of individuals gifted by fate? Is creative power dependent on one's degree of intelligence? Is the creative potential something naturally found in children, which in most people disappears in adulthood? Can it be learned, as one learns mathematics or a language? And most of all, can it be maintained throughout adulthood? Can it be lost, and if lost, can it be regained? Does it naturally decline across the life journey?

Whether or not you believe that creativity is found in some degree throughout humankind will clearly depend on your original definition. If you believe, as was long believed in European culture, that creativity is to be spoken of in terms of grandeur, as something associated with the original act of creation, a godlike quality, then you will reserve the term and your thoughts about if for the "great" creators of the arts, science, and perhaps statecraft. If, on the other hand, you believe that there is a native ingenuity latent in the human adult that is intermittently roused by the thousands of life's intersections, you will join such expert commentators as Carl Rogers, Harold Anderson, Calvin Taylor, the botanist Edmund Sinnott (who saw it in the whole of the life process), Eric Fromm, the architect Alden Dow, and Abraham Maslow in viewing it as a universal potential in enormously differing degrees.

    Maslow was led to this conception by the logic of his view of "selfactualisation" as one of two great arenas of the creative life. His statement on this is eloquent:

One woman, uneducated, poor, a full-time housewife and mother, did none of the conventionally creative things and yet was a marvellous cook, mother, wife, and homemaker. . . she was in all these areas original, novel, ingenious, unexpected, inventive. I )ust had to call her creative. I learned from her and others like her to think that a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting, and that generally, cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative whereas poetry need not be; it could be uncreative.

Another of my subjects 'devoted herself to what had best be called social service in the broadest sense, bandaging up wounds, helping the downtrodden, not only in a personal way, but in an organizational way as well. One of her "creations" is an organization which helps many more people than she could individually.

Another was a psychiatrist, a "pure" clinician who never wrote anything or created any theories or researches but who delighted in his everyday job of helping people to create themselves. This man approached each patient as if he were the only one in the world, without jargon, expectations, or presuppositions, with innocence and naivet6 and yet with great wisdom, in a Taoistic fashion. Each patient was a unique human being and therefore a completely new problem to be understood and solved in a completely novel way. His great success even with very difficult cases validated his "creative" (rather than stereotyped or orthodox) way of doing things.

Maslow's condescension to "second-rate painting" was unnecessary to his very strong argument for the universality and catholicity of the creative potential-and in any case, his other definition of "special talent" creativity completes the picture. A lovely quatrain by W. B. Yeats on the relationship between the creative potential and the human self making its way across the life journey adds resonance to this point of view:

So far as creativity is seen as problem-solving, the mental or cognitive function is obviously important. However, even here the fascinating question arises as to whether some forms of intelligence are not actual blocks to creative achievement. This question emerges in the scenes described by Edward de Bono (1967) where so-called "vertical thinkers," as he calls the people highly programmed into exactly logical thinking, are frequently blocked from creative solutions that they might reach through "lateral" thinking-that is, thinking in a new key, imaginative abandoning of old routines, and rigid protocols. Jerome Bruner has written helpfully about the importance of guessing-although even here the phrase that immediately turns up is "intelligent guessing." And Simone de Beauvoir with her usual flair, in writing about creativity, intelligence, and the arts, makes the persuasive argument that there is an indispensable link between warm sexual feeling and creativity, thus making it fair to ask whether the cold intelligence, however "high," is not often an inhibitor of creativity.

"Divergent thinking," that is, thinking when the mind is constructively at play with fresh, unexpected approaches, is considered by the British psychologist H. J. Butcher, a most perceptive student of the subject, as possibly a different form of intelligence, or at least a different ability, from the sort of intelligence called upon for convergent thinking-that is, the processes of purely logical or tradition-trained thought. The whole debate on the roles of intelligence in creativity has been further complicated by the left brain/right brain controversy. In fact, the prime issue for seeker-adults in their middle and later years is not whether intelligence is valuable in the creative process, since it is; nor whether they have sufficient intelligence to create well, since they have; nor whether their cognitive powers will remain with rich firepower to and through their very late years, since this they can almost certainly ensure (see Chapter 5).

A more pressing issue is to recognize that when a man or woman is engaged in creative action, large or small, two "kingdoms of the mind" are typically engaged, often simultaneously: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Then to recognize that, to varying degrees, the human adult can employ these great forces to help liberate his or her creative potentials.

The conscious mind can be seen at work in such cases as these: recalling facts and insights from the large store of information learned deliberately and always kept on hand; taking such resources and manipulating them to produce fresh insights, inventions, and creative material; and exercising the tremendous function of choosing from the rich but disordered flood of materials pouring forth from the great reservoir of the unconscious mind. In fact, in a recent seminar on the creative process in Toronto, when the young black composer Edford Providence was asked what he considered the essence of the process at work he replied almost without a pause: "Choices! "-then necessarily qualified this by noting all the other powerful components involved in the act of creation.

The working in creativity of the unconscious mind has been vividly illustrated by anecdotes from the best of sources: creative people themselves. Thus, A. E. Housman, the British poet, whose youth-filled, moving lyrics seemed to belie his outer personality of the conventional Oxbridge don, described how two stanzas of one of his best-known poems came into his head "just as they are printed while I was crossing the comer of Hampstead Heath-a third with a little coaxing after tea." The fourth he had to "turn to and compose it myself, and it was more than a twelve-month before I got it right." Nietzsche reported in Ecce Homo that while in Italy, walking near Genoa, all of his famous work Thus Spake Zarathustra came to him: to use his words, ."perhaps I should rather say, invaded me."

Van Gogh, in a letter to a friend, described how he tried, using his conscious mind, to force the creative process. He attempted a number of drawings of what was to be a famous painting: they all failed. Then a mysterious spring opened. The next drawings, unforced, appeared with the feeling he wanted which made them live. The modern French dramatist and filmmaker jean Cocteau described how he was "sick and tired of writing"; he fell asleep, slept poorly, woke with a start, and as though in a trance saw played out before him three acts of the play The Knights of the Round Table, which he transcribed long afterward. Cocteau describes this as "a visitation." He talks about "unknown forces" working deep within us, in ultimate collaboration with events in daily life.

The same phenomenon is reported from the worlds of science and invention. An oft-recited case is that of the highly creative mathematician Henri Poincar6 who, frustrated for days in attempting by conscious logic to formulate a new and revolutionary theorem, decided simply to give it up temporarily and join some geographers on a trip through the French countryside. Hours after having dismissed the conscious struggle from his mind, just as he was stepping into the holiday bus, the mysterious solution occurred to him. The anecdote is a good one because it reminds us that a good deal of toil and conscious striving often precedes the illumination. The grim logician, who will try, do or die, to force all the locks by the conscious process, and his contrasting human type, the dilettante, will often, it seems, miss their creative achievement.

The architect Ulrich Franzen describes how he builds big cardboard models, pulls them apart, puts them back, playing endlessly until mysteriously "things begin to emerge." And Franzen adds laconically, "Somehow it's unconscious." Wilder Penfield, a famous explorer of the physical brain, uses the expression, "the back of the mind." He also is fascinated by the unexpectedness of the appearance of creative ideas, the sudden breakthroughs. He describes how, during the writing of his first novel, No Other Gods (at age 64), "while operating ... when things were quiet and I was closing up, these characters would come to the back of my mind and we'd talk and plan."

The unconscious process at work is very familiar also in the many unnoticed or unremarked-on episodes in the lives of private men and women. So frequent is the phenomenon of an original or creative idea flashing into the conscious mind and disappearing, usually beyond recovery unless noted down, that facilitators of the creative process advise their readers or listeners to keep a small notebook at the bedside or to carry around through the day a little note pad, or idea trap, for jotting down thoughts or impressions. Many students have known the experience of going to sleep with an unsolved exercise in science or mathematics and waking up with the solution; and in mature adult life, of having the same experience with life or career problems. The unconscious mind has been at work.

Arthur Koestler writes with great 61an about three creative situations where the conscious and unconscious minds intersect, which he calls the AHA, the AH, and the HAHA experiences. For Koestler, "all creative activity is a kind of do-it-yourself therapy, an attempt to come to terms with traumatizing challenges." Life at certain points presents scientists and artists (and all of us, in our way) with certain problems that overload the circuits and force the human personality and organism to find new routes, devices, strategies, inventions. If these can be found through the conscious mind, well and good; if not, what the individual will often do is to retreat into the unconscious, that great and mysterious storehouse of memories, impressions, insights, fantasies, long since lost to the recollection of the conscious mind. Koestler calls this storehouse an "underground" where mental action takes place like games, where "hidden analogies," for example, take place "between cabbages and kings." This realm of the unconscious is not the inferno of Freud's id, although it will have its infernal fires. Rather, it is a place where rich materials exist not only to inhibit or frustrate, but on the contrary, over and over again to make creative breakthroughs possible. In fact, as seen earlier, whole products and projects of the individual's creative life may be produced from the unconscious workshop with its powers of association and fusion.

The AHA experience, familiar to gestalt psychology, is described by Robert Frost as that moment when "the box clicks shut," what Koestler calls, "the flash of illumination," the experience already described of Poincaré. The AH reaction is a moment of self-transcendence, of what Koestler compares to being "in an empty cathedral when eternity is looking through the window of time, and in which the self seems to dissolve like a grain of salt in water." This experience obviously engages the whole of one's being, not only the unconscious self; yet it is usually highly evocative-the environment of many creative motivations and inspirations.

The creative tension being unreasonable is exploded by laughter.

Fascinating though it may be to study the unconscious'mind at work in the creative process, Ulyssean adults or soon-to-be Ulysseans who are already seeker-adults cannot be satisfied to leave "creativity" to so mysterious and automatic an operation. If this were an, individual men and women could be quite fatalistic about their creative potentials, just as they are about their inheritance of specific "talents." In fact, it seems indisputable that people have special gifts for languages, for science, for musical composition, for mechanics, and so on; and this, of course, is border country to personal creativity. Is it possible, going beyond, this, to become a more creative person-that is to say, a person who, whatever his or her equipment in talents, is able steadily to grow as a creative being? For such a person, the horizons of the creative life can steadily expand; new domains appear for exploration. Yeats's line returns to us, in one of its several fertile meanings: "It is myself that I remake."

In this light, even the workings of the unconscious self that seem at first sight to be so inaccessible to the influence of the known self may grow in its contribution in enriched environments and climates. If the unconscious mind is a reservoir feeding many times the creative inspiration in a hundred fields, it seems manifest that the richer the life of thought and action in turn feeding thousands of swiftly "forgotten" data, pictures, impressions, and insights into the personal reservoir, the richer will be the creative bank to draw from.

Thus, when men and women proceeding through life choose to continually open their minds to new learning experiences, rather than to close them; choose to break old drying routines, rather than be dried by them; choose to keep the wonder-filled mind of the "OK Child" awake, rather than to let it fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle for 20 or more years; choose to let fantasy enrich their thoughts, rather than scorn anything other than "the light of common day"; choose to seek ways to enliven and sensitize their physical senses and their psychic inner senses-, and choose to seek all the strategies they can to release their solving of problems from the grip of tired and ineffective logical rituals--when they make these choices to become more "fully human, fully alive," they also surely enrich the fluid and pulsing bank of creative options in the unconscious, and also help liberate the creative powers residing in the fully conscious, but often stubbornly anti-creative, self.

The wise acceptance of these choices, these affirmations for the creative life, might be summed up as "the creative attitude," and it is-but "attitude" is too passive a term. Seeker-adults who set as an important goal the continuing use and growth of their creative powers until the last day of their life can actually build into their functions of thought and action exercises and strategies that continually freshen and facilitate their creativity. From my own and other creativity seminars I cite a few that will serve here as symbols to make the point.

1. Heighten the sensitivity of the five physical senses. Taste: Describe the tastes in your personal repertoire that most please or excite you. What new tastes have you recently acquired? What tastes, never experienced, but read about or heard from travelers, or imagined, can you describe? Seek for evocation of the taste, real or imagined. Sight: What sights most stir or vitalize you? Take some object or person often seen: describe it or him vividly, with detail, as though never before seen. (Do not confuse 20/20 sight with "seeing"!) Search in your daily activities for sights never actualized. 0 Learn the symbolism of physical seeing: what "ordinary" sight gives you on reflection, a transfigured vigion of the object or person? E.g., a candle burning on a caf6 table, or a lonely objector at a political convention. Sound: What sounds most move or intrigue you? What sounds, never physically heard, can you imagine and describe? (The sounds of a cobra; of an avalanche; of a windmill turning; of a UFO approaching.) Take five minutes in your busy day to listen, utterly, to all the sounds possible to hear, and note them down afterward. Which would you normally have missed? Touch: Arrange with a friend or two to identify, while blindfolded, certain objects or surfaces. Imagine, and record with imaginative words, the feel of touching various things, animals, or other human beings. Smell: What aromas, perfumes, or smells most arouse or please you? Describe them as carefully as possible, by analogy if necessary. What smells have the reverse effect? What aromas or fragrances evoke visions of people, scenes, or stories (e.g., woodsmoke, old books, wet wool, wild roses, dry leather)? What hitherto-unexperienced aroma would you inhale with delight, if you could? Describe it as you imagine it.

In How to Meditate, Lawrence LeShan, with his usual wisdom and grace, supplies a number of meditations designed to calm and then hberate the -mind and spirit for richer reality: the Meditation of the Bubble, of the Indian Campfire, of the Thousand-Petaled Lotus, of the Safe Harbour, of the "Who Am I?"

Even where these exercises in stretching the powers of the inner or psychic self are not specifically designed to contribute to one's creativity, in fact they can be powerful allies. The point has been made of the value of higher actualization of the senses, not only in the arts, but in attacking the many problems that call for greater alertness and mobilization of mind and energy. But there is another need in the creative life to which this more conscious selfhood can contribute. This is the need for what I call "creative poise"-the need of the mind to turn off useless "brain chatter," which simply impedes creative flows, and the need of the whole person many times in creative work to be rescued from the endless trivia and interruptions of many daylight hours, the distractions that can act as "the death of a thousand cuts"! The environment of creative thought often is not merely physical (Emerson seeking a hotel for a time to write his essays) but is a temporary way of life that permits us to regain our balance, our creative poise. This is one of the meanings to be derived from Wordsworth's too-much-neglected line: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

3. Cut off, like dead tree limbs, old drying routines in doing, thinking, reading, and speaking; and open up to fresh, invigorating experiences. Certain personal routines are valuable: they save us time and free us for fresh adventures. One cannot be forever looking for a different locker at the health club, a different newsstand, or abandoning a comfortable practice like tea at a favorite hour. Some routines can help us get through crises or periods of undue turbulence. But other routines prevent us from exploring fresh trails, from seeing views and horizons that challenge and renew us. Still others lead to the wastelands of unexamined, dominating ideas that can become the barriers to innovation and creative change. (See also page 15. )

Therefore: choose new modes of doing things. Take new routes, however seemingly similar to your usual ones, to office, church or temple, club, or other familiar destination. Find a Skills Exchange or its equivalent and develop some hitherto unexpected craft or activity. Investigate the value of one new social movement; open a conversation with three new people a week. Try to bridge an existing silence or difficulty between yourself and a colleague, friend, relative, or enemy. Seek a new cultural group-any event will do-one you like very much in prospect and one you dislike. Walk part way into their country. Travel by a new mode. Try to break an old fear, an old phobia (the thrill, the real thrill, of unlearning what we should never have learned.) See also "60 Ways to Be Younger Than You Are" (p. 213).

And: think and read in a new key. Check your list of favorite authors-whom have y ou added lately? What other reading have you missed, buried in your science fiction or murder mysteries? Browse weekly for three hours in a good community library. Deliberately buy one journal, paper, or watch one program weekly, irritatingly opposed to your usual and comfortable points of view. Read two paperbacks by Edward de Bono. Take a course on creative processes or "how to think." Find a book of stimulating problems and teasers (all good bookstores have them). Write your own life story up to date, as if written by another person (Nehru did it!). Keep a personal reflective journal day by day for a month (and longer, if it seems beneficial). (See also Chapter 9.)

And also: speak your own language with new zest and grace. Browse through a good dictionary and add three new words a week to your vocabulary. Invent a new word once a week-try fresh combinations, fresh concepts. (Friends of mine who meant to spend Thanksgiving together, and missed, and knew they would miss Christmas, made up a new holiday, "Thankchrist," and celebrated it.) Freshen your slang: "old hat" is old hat. Take the tired similes we have used for years ("as smart as a whip," "as sick as a dog," etc.) and find new images for them. Also, have fun composing new phrases to follow the muchabused word, "like": "He raced toward freedom like A . . ." (Think about it.) How easilywe accept and use clich6s and worn-out images. Likewise with metaphors: but with these we also enter the rich realms of fantasy.

Surprise your mind by often liberating it to fantasy. Fantasy can be for sheer exhilaration, but it can also be the avenue to practical new discoveries, as the worlds of mind-storming and Synectics know. Of course, we all dream and fantasize, but most of us forget our dreams and never utilize the creative aspect of developed fantasy. For exariple: Imagine that the earth faces the r~al possibility of total destruction by nuclear war. You have been entrusted with the command and outfitting of a small spacecraft carrying some of the species' best evidences of civilization to another planet. What would you take on board this modem space ark? Or: suppose that you could be bom in another place and time, of (if you like) a different racial group, in a different vocation-what would you be and do? Don't stop with the first vague picture. Keep sharpening the focus and developing the details. Or: suppose that the situation that Alvin Silverstein thinks he sees realistically coming, occurs: that death at last is conquered on earth: what are some of the results? Or suppose that all the cats in the world suddenly disappear one day at midnight: what are the consequences? You can make up many of your own fantasy situations. As for invention: somewhere some first man or woman fantasized: "Suppose human beings could fly?" The magical word, "Suppose. . .," is the other parent of invention.

Keep awake the creative child-self in your self-system, Eric Berne's "OK-Child," and release him or her frequently for experiences of wonder and rapture, of glee, of fantastic games, of the absurd. For example: list vertically the names of ten animals and great birds, and beside it place another vertical list of the most prominent feature of each creature. Now, using double-digit numbers chosen at random, create new creatures and invent new names. Also: make up a limerick starting with one of these lines: "A gorilla sat down in a bar," or "The angriest woman in France," or "The wind blew my house to Vancouver" (there is no way that you can be pompous, adult-style, with the limerick; its pizzicato middle lines will see to that!) Or: suppose that people had tails, or four arms, or that (as E. P. Torrance delightfully suggests in one of his exercises) clouds had strings attached to them. To children these are subjects for delighted speculation; adults who retain or nourish this quality also contain in themselves one of the sacred fires of the creative process.

"Combine," Goethe wrote, "always combine"--and, in fact, combination, usually of hitherto strange or seemingly incompatible elements, is one of the great motors of creativity in the arts, in science, in invention, in statecraft, in interpersonal life. Everywhere we look we can see evidence of the creative power of combining things-in colors, in furniture, in music, in architecture, in everyday inventions, in town planning, in food. But typically we merely react to the combinations devised by others: what we need to do is to develop our own faculty of combination to envision and create new things. Nor is the creative process limited only to combination. As one example, take a few minutes to note down some of the creative products and situations brought into being by, of all things, eliminating something: a personal lifestyle transformed by what you deliberately subtract from it; a manuscript transformed by imaginative editing; a too-fussy woman's outfit or an overloaded industrial design made not only "functional" but beautiful by creative elimination. (Examples of other creative "motors" at work can be found in Chapter 9.)

One of the great blocks to creative problem-solving is the fixed orthodox concept that might best be called "the dominating idea." Powerful, driving ideas obviously have their own creative role, since they can supply the will, energy, and tenacity needed to hold on to a baffling search, and of course at times the dominating concept is, after all, the right concept. But times without number, it is not; and far more: the block that destroys the creative person's work is something within his own system of long-revered practices or views, or within his cultural taboos.

The history of cultural blocks and dominating, destructive (anti-creative) ideas is a fascinating one. If you take some time to make a list of some, you may find yourself jotting down examples ranging from the three-centuries-old custom of binding the feet of aristocratic Chinese girls to the obsession of medieval town-planning with cathedral squares, to the fatal devotion of World War One generals to the role of the horse, and the blind defence of the status-quo with which the medical establishment of Vienna and Budapest (and elsewhere) met the new antiseptic ideas of Semmelweiss. All too often we ourselves look at familiar objects, literally for years, and never see the variations possible in their designs and uses because they all seem so obvious. But seeing through or beyond the obvious is another of the great motors of the creative process.

In one of his charming books on creativity Edward de Bono invites the reader to gaze at a familiar figure: a rectangle with the horizontal sides overlapping equally. He then presents, by the simple assumption that the four sides of the figure can be moved and maneuvered, like bars or sticks, 33 variations of the original figure, in L-forms, crossforms, etc., until it seems incredible that all these forms were actually existent within the original overlapping rectangle (which, incidentally, one might compare to the shape of a dull municipal park). De Bono devotes a whole chapter to developing and speculating about these forms and their diversity, and the many further assemblies of figures that are possible once one is freed from the grip of the taken-for-granted situation. But the essence and illumination of his argument is well summed up in these sentences:

The pieces created for the sake of explanation or description soon come to exist on their own as separate entities. They continue to exist even when the situation out of which they arose has been forgotten.... In this way, entities which have been created quite arbitrarily become strengthened by their usefulness until it becomes impossible to doubt their existence. When this stage is reached, such entities may actually obstruct progress.

Not convergence of the wholly familiar, but divergence using unexpected approaches and capitalizing upon chance and serendipity will many times provide the key to a stubborn problem. De Bono's own useful term for this less conforming, more imaginative process is "lateral thinking," and he usefully remarks:

Vertical thinkers take the most reasonable view of a situation, and then proceed logically and carefully to work it out. Lateral thinkers tend to explore all the different ways of looking at some thing, rather than accepting the most promising and proceeding from that.

What this now has to do with creativity in the middle and later years is evident enough. The creative process is a spring partly flowing or seeking to flow from the man or woman's own complex nature and circumstances; but it is much more than that. It is a process actively released by many of the strategies and experiences suggested in this chapter-the strategies of search, of stretching of mind and spirit, of maintaining wonder and fantasy, of risking and even enjoying the absurd, and of not only entertaining unusual approaches in problem-solving but actively going outside the shelter of long-familiar concepts to find them.

If adults in their middle and later years feel a "falling-off 'in their creative powers, or for that matter the failure of powers to awaken, the reason will almost certainly not be some mysterious ebbing and drying up of the inherent talents, whatever they are (this is developed further in Chapter 6). The problem will be with what might be called the "enabling powers" of the creative process-the will to produce and create, personal energy both physical and psychic, and competence to avoid or remove whatever blocks may be placed in one's way by the environment or by one's emotional and cognitive systems.

An interesting illustration of some of the issues at stake here is seen in the recent later-life performance of the British woman novelist M. M. Kaye, the author of The Far Pavilions, an enormous narrative (about 400,000 words) of fine quality. Kaye was brought up in a family descended from and maintaining the traditions of the British Army in India, and she married an officer of the same tradition. Kaye had already written a huge and excellent novel set in British India, and had begun The Far Pavilions when she learned that she had cancer. This evidently slowed down her writing while she fought the disease, which she defeated after four years. She was then 68. She resumed writing and completed the novel by age 74 in 1977. Many critics and readers of the book have commented on, among other qualities, its zest and drive, the thrust and power of the plot, and the vivid characterizations.

The writing of a novel of 1,000 closely printed pages, in which the pageant of plot and subplots and dozens of characters and major episodes must move with sustained strength and insight to a satisfying climax, is an awesome task. One writer of a very large book has even remarked of it later: "My angel wrote the book!"--a perhaps poetic reference to the role of the deep or Jungian self. But it is not the angel who writes the book (or paints the painting or solves a complex mathematical problem, or whatever), but oneself. a man or woman of this or that state of health, of this age or that, and in a particular set of circumstances.

A recent photograph of the author of The Far Pavilions shows a very pretty, elderly Englishwoman in a charming living room; she looks as if she might be about to offer tea and chat about the local county fair. Yet this is the woman who was able to call forth the energy to write a huge novel. M. M. Kaye's performance illustrates the power of the enabling forces in creativity in addition to her basic writing talent. She possessed the will, energy, stamina, self-confidence, and devotion to the concept of the creative task, which Alfred North Whitehead once termed "the Sacred Present." However, as with all created work of whatever dimension, until it is completed and can be accepted, its importance is virtually nonexistent to anyone but oneself.

This is where self-confidence enters in. One has to believe in what one is doing, whatever the creative task, and then, even or especially if the project is likely to be a long-range one, believe that it will be completed. Since the human mind, that "lithe animal," as some yogi masters term it, finds perverse pleasure many times in running down negative paths, it may make discouraging calculations. "If this novel turns out to be 400,000 words or so, and I write at 1,000 words a day" (a kind of maximum cited by many writers), "it will take me perhaps two years to do not only the writing but the required rewriting, editing, and all the rest. And I have had cancer, so that my energy may be rather less that it was. Etc., etc." (I use M. M. Kaye here solely as a prototype, with, I am sure, her distant blessing.)

All creative ventures involve, of course, the likelihood of "blocks" from tune to time during the process or before setting off. The lives of noted creative people are full of references to these temporary standstills, and the subject is important enough in the theory and practice of creativity that James L. Adams was able to devote an entire book (1974) to what he calls Conceptual Blockbusting. Among a few of Adams's cited reasons for the occurrence of creative blocks that are relevant here are: fear of taking a risk; no appetite for the necessary temporary disorder into which the creative process often brings us; judging ideas too soon instead of just going ahead and generating them; lack of challenge in the actual problem (fair enough: then one naturally turns to another!); excess of zeal and too great expectations; cultural taboos that hem us in; inability to relax into wonder and humor; and inflexible use of intellectual problem-solving strategies.

To these can be added some comments from a charming paper on "How to Unblock" by the American psychotherapist and painter, Desy Safan-Gftard. Writing from the valuable double perspectives of being both practitioner and theoretician (she has also observed the creative process in action among colleagues and clients), Safan-Gdrard cites the following as causes of blocks: facing the work before you are ready, without giving ideas time to develop; being too much governed by a preconceived form when the ideas cannot be contained by it (my own pastime of writing sonnets in the traditional style confirms much of Safan-G&ard's premise here!); and setting expectations too high and evaluating too soon (note how this resonates with Adams's ideas). She notes with some amusement that when her creative subjects report on what they do when faced with a temporary block, many of them report that they first go away to find something to eat!

However, for many men and women in their middle and later years, the greatest problem in their creative progress is, not inhibiting blocks within the work in progress, but rather the lack of will and the confidence to undertake creative enterprises at all. They may believe "I'm not creative," or believe that, though creative in childhood, they no longer are in adulthood (the falsity of both these premises has been already indicated).

Or they may have accepted the terrible myths of our throwaway society and believe that from the mid-50s on, and more so in later years, their physical, mental, and creative resources are all declining. As they see it, their friendship circle, their income, and their influence in various spheres-business, family, politics--are also declining. This is the terrifying misconception out of which grows the familiar refrain of all those dear hearts who "always meant to" do the special creative task but now think they never will. Reinforcing negative phrases abound: "I haven't the energy I had when younger"; "I just couldn't carry it through"; "My life's taken a different turn"; "I actually wrote a novel at 40, never published, of course; and now…"

Where, then, does the energy of people like M. M. Kaye come from? I suggest, as one answer, that men and women in later maturity who may feel some decline of former physical energy have wisely learned that there is something I call "essential energy," necessary for creative and other Ulyssean ventures, which they have learned to conserve and use well. And, there is also the whole radiant resource of the psychic power, closely linked to faith and will.

However, for every adult, typically Ulyssean, who sustains or regains his or her creative powers throughout later middle age and on through the very late years, there are clearly many who have given up what they conceive to be the struggle to realize themselves. Some may indeed be living, in Thoreau's unforgettable phrase, "lives of quiet desperation," but for most the process is less dramatic and in fact different. They are not desperate (in some cases it would be better if they were, since desperation may breed action): rather, they have lost confidence in their own special talents, and beyond that, in their own unique selfhood-an attitude also conditioned and reinforced by a throwaway society, beset by the myths described in Chapter 1.

Thus, those who would turn or return to the Myssean concept in later life need to be concerned not only about the true nature and inborn promise of their creativity but also about the crucial connections between creativity and self-identity.