Relationships and Creativity

Interesting post on Creativity by Andrea at Atypical Homeschooling and a follow-up by JoVE at Tricotomania -- The Absolute Necessity of Stash.

JoVE makes a distinction in this post between product and importance. Not everything of value has to have a "product". Some things are valuable in themselves. She develops the idea in another post, Radical Thoughts on Work.

Instead of limiting our political demands to a recognition of the "work" aspects of play and mothering, we need to upset more people's notions of what is really important. We should be arguing for the value of play (for everyone: adults and children) and for the value of relationships (all kinds: romantic, parenting, friendship, extended family, etc.) and the rebalancing of life so that work is not taking up such a big chunk of everyone's time and energy. If work were not so overvalued, and play and relationships so undervalued, our society would be a much nicer place.

This reminds me of a book I read several years back, that I would like to read again if I could find it in my yet-to-be-organized piles of books. Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Joseph Pieper. Here's a summary. When we devote ourselves too entirely to the idea of "work" defined as productive output, we limit our personal meaning to the economic sphere. It's not that the economic sphere is unimportant -- it's that there is more to life, and the "more" is often the longlasting, meaningful part. You've probably heard the story of the Mexican fisherman. The most meaningful things in life are those that can't be bought or traded or sold. But they can be collected and cherished, and they can be the basis for the interaction between "things" and "thought" that seems to be the basis for creativity.

A longtime cyber-friend of mine has a whole blog devoted to one aspect of this thought:
It is About the Journey. The destination is important, of course; but HOW you get there and WHY you are going there is sometimes overlooked.

This also seems to relate a bit to Elegant Simplicity. Simplicity is an important aspect of elegance, but simplicity is not the same as mere efficiency or functionality. And elegance also comprises power and grace. Which brings me back to "stash". I could not rightly call myself a knitter, but the idea of "stash" has resonance to me because it relates to the philosophical concept of "potential". Potential is what an infant human has -- latent power or a capacity for developing into something which it already IS, in essence. A seed is another example of potential. So is a relationship. So in our pursuit of efficiency, it's important not to cast out the very things that make true effectiveness possible. A writer will tell you about all the richness of ideas that go into a finished literary work. Lots of them discarded, lots of them channelled into a form very different from the original, but all of them necessary to lay the ground for that final work.