Are we born with creativity? - Tabula Rasa guest post by GamerCrafting

To celebrate the release of De Anima shawl I have asked some superb crafters and bloggers to write a guest blog for me on Tabula Rasa.

De Anima or On the Soul - the treatise of Aristotle, in which the concept of Tabula Rasa in Western philosophy originated. 
Tabula Rasa refers to the idea that we are born without built-in content and that all we know comes from experience and perception. It is a truly fascinating concept, and I very often ponder it when I teach knit and crochet. We acquire skills through practice. Some of us are taught those skills at a young age, but do we possess them already in our unconscious mind? The same can be said for talent… do we acquire it or are we simply born with it? 

Today guest blog is by my very good friend and fellow crafter Ange the creator of GamerCrafting. Ange is not only a fab knitter and yarn dyer but also an amazing musician. Who better to talk about talent than her.

Are we born with creativity, or is it a learned skill?

For people like us, creativity is as important as the air we breathe. Without new ideas and inspirations, the world around us feels dull and grey. But what made us like this? Are we born creative, or do we learn it the same way we learned to read and write?

Tabula Rasa is the idea that we’re all born as a blank slate - an empty mind to be filled up with learned experiences, new ideas, and information. Aristotle compared us to new characters in a play, who are nothing but blank slates until the author gives them a personality and a purpose. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that wars are the result of social conditioning, and never an innately human condition. I’d like to think that he’s right, and maybe someday we’ll all learn to embrace the humanity of others.

If we are born as blank slates, then what makes us creative? Do we chase activities and ideas that we received positive feedback on as children, or is it as simple as a chemical reaction in the brain, with concoctions of hormones and endorphins that make us feel emotion?

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The trouble is remaining an artist once we grow up.” Maybe as we grow and observe the world around us, and we start comparing our work to others, we start to doubt our own creativity. Maybe your finger painting wasn’t as “good” as someone else’s, and so you deemed yourself “not artistic.” Maybe we just tell stories about ourselves so often that we begin to believe them. I’m not artistic, I’m bad at math, I’m shy, I’m too aggressive. Maybe we are more than the two dimensional versions of ourselves that strangers see. Allow yourself to be three dimensional and explore every inch of your creative mind; after all, life is short. No one on their deathbed has ever said, “Man, I really wish I had been less creative.”

 I have a theory that everyone is creative, but in different ways. An engineer who invents a new machine is creative, but in a vastly different way to an experimental contemporary musician who uses sound samples of a cityscape to weave an auditory tapestry of exploration. You just have to figure out how to tap into that creativity to make it shine. If we’re born as blank slates, then it’s up to us to write our own creative stories.

Sometimes, a blank slate needs new inspiration. Take a walk in the world around you to find inspiration in the smallest places. A crack in an old tile, a flower growing through concrete, or frost on an early morning. We’re responsible for growing ourselves and our creativity, no one can do it for you. Listen to music you’ve never heard before - in fact, listen to the piece titled Tabula Rasa, written by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. I promise it will make you feel something. I can’t say what that something is, because I’m not you; I feel a deep sense of “hiraeth,” a Welsh word which means homesickness for a time or a place that you can’t return to.

I leave you with a challenge: do something, anything this week that ignites your creativity. Allow yourself the space to be creative and give yourself permission to write on your own blank slate.

                                                       Some of Ange's delicious yarns