and there is no doubt that our capacity for fantasy and thereby invention, is crucial to reversing the negative trends of climate change, economic deprivation, and all related ills.
But on a personal level, creative thinking skills are of enormous benefit. I am a poet. I dare almost not to say the words. I am not famous for poetry or even well-known. In fact, the poetry I write may even be bad.
But poetry has been my therapist, my best friend, my muse, and my refuge since I started writing it 40 years ago.
It is a space I can step into where anything is allowed. I can BE anyone, I can TALK like anyone, I can HAVE any opinion. After all, I may just throw it away when I am done. I can attempt new styles, new forms, new techniques.
I can travel to fantasy worlds, explore my deepest feelings, shout out my deepest desires… safely… onto a page.
In doing so I become acquainted with what the reality of sharing these thoughts, emotions, and ideas might feel like. I get to step inside them, turn them over and inside out, break them apart and re-arrange them. In short, I can play, research, learn and grow, all under the guise of composing poetry.
But more than this, I have become adaptable, inventive, and proactive. I am used to spending time in ambiguous, complex situations where no specific, concrete outcome is visible. I am used to sitting with the nebulous, the ill-defined, and the vague, waiting to see what emerges. In short, I have learned to lay aside the often binary, polarised constraints of much of how our world works in order to imagine different solutions and outcomes, different systems, and ways of doing things.
Poetry can be both rigid and dogmatic, employ specific rhyme schemes, rhythmic constraints, line numbers, and so on. Or it can be totally free and unstructured. Neither extreme makes the result any less a poem.
But it does need words, and language has limits when describing sensations, feelings, ideas, and impressions. So you have to bend and adapt the tools of words to make them hit people in previously unimagined ways, to paint pictures, and compose songs that are never seen or heard but read.
Neurologically, what occurs in my brain when I composing poetry is exactly the same thing that occurs in the inventor, the scientist, the entrepreneur, the doctor, the troubleshooter, and the composer’s brains: a joining of the dots employing 3 distinct areas of the brain in a coordinated dance of information, emotion, and pure projection.
And because a ‘thing’ is always the result, I gain fulfilment, release, relief, and confidence from my poetry.
Don’t reject art out of hand. It is the gym, the development lab of all that we see.
Maybe you can try your hand one day?
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