Our Choices Newsletters
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Good Morning everyone, from now on when I come across something I think is worth sharing with the group, I will post it on this newsletter.The Creative Process
Creativity is at the core of a happy, meaningful, productive life. It is through our creativity that we bring order and meaning to our world. We use our creativity in how we create our homes, raise our children, build our careers, and continually reinvent a sustaining and joyous relationship. Cultivating creativity is as important to our souls as exercise and good nutrition are to our bodies, and they overlap, they work together.
Researcher Graham Wallas identifies four stages of the creative process. The four stages, adapted by Pierce Howard, author of The Owner's Manual for the Brain, are
Preparation: This is the time for research, fact gathering, assembling materials, gathering needed information before the creative act.
Incubation: This is the period of gestation, of letting go so that the mind, the unconscious, intuition, and emotion can mull over the information and put it into its own original perspective. Dreaming may be a part of this period.
Inspiration: This is the "Aha!" when the solution, illumination, or discovery either emerges or forces itself through into a coalesced form.
Evaluation or confirmation: This is the time to ask, Will it work, does it hold up next to other theories, does it logically fit with the original stimulus?
I am a creator.
"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. As everyone else, I love to dunk my crust in it. But alone it is not a diet to keep body and soul together."--Bette DavisThe Lonely Life (1962)
