THE WHEEL OF CREATIVITY®

You know, there are just so many untold stories in the world. So many anonymous lives, each lived by a single human being with dreams and hopes, confusion and despair. Together, all 6,980,079,851 of us (at this moment now), whether we ever touch or see or hear of each other, we weave the web of life together. As an old friend of mine in Chicago used to say, “We’re all just muddling through.”

Well, what if one of those lives – you know, the disposable ones – the poor and nameless, the faces you never have to see except by accident when changing the channel, what if one of them made it out of the abyss. What kind of story would she share? What would be the tenor of his voice?

Today, I heard that voice. I heard his story. It moved me.

By the age of 8, Emmanuel Jal was a child soldier in Southern Sudan. At five, he saw his village burned, his aunt and sisters raped and his mother killed in the war that has ripped his country apart. Unable to read and write, he was sent to ‘school’ where he was trained to fight. And he was a soldier for the next five years.

When Jal was 13, a young British aid worker named Emma McCune found him, rescued him, and gave him a second life. That’s not the happy ending we’d like for our story, however. McCune was killed soon after in a car accident, leaving Jal to find his own way on the streets of Nairobi. From there, Jal took one step after another
following the journey of his extraordinary life to become the hip-hop star he is today, described by Peter Gabriel as having “the potential of a young Bob Marley.”

Jal, now just 29, founded Gua Africa, a UK charity whose mission is is to help individuals, families and communities overcome the effects of war and poverty. He is raising money to build a school in Southern Sudan, which he calls Emma Academy.

With music as his “weapon of choice,” Emmanuel Jal is doing the real work of the artist in society, transforming his suffering into light. But this work is not for the artist alone. It is for us all. For we all suffer. And the world is in need of light.

What does it mean to be creative?  What kind of person is the Wheel of Creativity for? It is for all of us.

• The hungry young boy whose voice cannot be heard
• The beautiful, elegant aid worker who sees his potential
• The person in his audience who wants to be moved
• The woman who accidentally finds his story online
• The person who reads her simple blog and decides to get involved

Share on Facebook

If we are to have any power at all over the quality of our lives, this is a question we all must answer for ourselves. How do we define creativity? And what place does it have in our lives?

Unless we grew up training for a career in the Arts, or in a tribal culture where creativity is practiced as a way of life, most of us have learned more about why we aren’t creative than why we are. I think it’s about time we changed that.

My own experience of creativity was given to me first in childhood through lessons in everything from tap dancing to singing to piano. The parochial school I grew up in was highly academic fare, with no Arts at all on the menu; so my parents offered me side dishes of creative expression between meals. The lessons revealed talent in certain areas (and not in others), and gave me opportunities (when judgment was in check) to explore the space I take up in the world. But it was in my time alone — with a pen, a page and a guitar — when I began to experience the natural flow of creative energy through me. That direct current of creative energy was exhilarating, and it nourished me.

Many of the people who come to my talks or participate in my groups, come with assumptions about what creativity is and what it isn’t. Either you are or you aren’t. Creativity is this, and not that. I have time to be creative, or I don’t. Those assumptions must be overcome before we can re-empower ourselves as the natural creators that we all are, before we can work with our circumstances as the raw materials with which to create our lives.

I’m intrigued with these assumptions. Were we born with them? Or did we learn them along the way? Are they true? Do they serve us? Or, if we could see them, could we choose to live a different way? I think we could.

So, I’ve decided to launch a short survey, to find out what assumptions about creativity we are living from. It might be interesting to find out for yourself. Eight questions. Ten minutes max. So, please join in. Forward this post to your friends, so they can participate as well. And watch for the results in a future edition of the Wheel of Creativity Email Newsletter. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so here).

Click here to take the survey.

And go ahead and post your comments here if you’d like to share your definition. Get creative!

Share on Facebook

All around the world today, Americans celebrate the 4^th of July at family gatherings, neighborhood picnics, community parades and public fireworks. It was on this day 235 years ago that representatives of the thirteen United States of America carefully and unanimously declared themselves to be independent of British rule. The most famous of their well-crafted sentences is the second:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

We do not so often quote the others. The declaration goes on to recognize that human beings are more prone to continue suffering under an abusive system than “to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” And it continues that when such abuses remain unchecked, leading to “absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

From the American Revolution to now, we have built our lives on the shoulders of generations who came before us—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters—who fought and died for our inalienable rights. Many in the world do not agree with these rights, and millions still endure their domination. Today, hundreds of thousands are drafting their own declarations and fighting their own revolutions to secure them.

The powers of the Status Quo will always fight for their survival. Thus, the declaration of our independence from any repressive system comes with a cost.

From the signing of America’s declaration in 1776, the war to secure those rights went on for another seven years. The costs were tremendous, both…

In financial terms:

• Americans spent $150 million, paid for by foreign and domestic loans and an early version of quantitative easing.
• The British spent £80 million, finishing the war with £250 million in debt.
• France spent the equivalent of $90 million and its resulting debt of $300 million is said to have had a major influence on the French Revolution.

And in loss of life:

• At least 25,000 American revolutionaries died in active duty:  8,000 in battle and another 17,000 from starvation and disease (half to three-quarters of them as prisoners of war). Between 8,500 and 25,000 were seriously wounded or disabled. And, as was often the case in those times, disease killed another 130,000 as a smallpox epidemic swept North America.
• Of 171,000 British sailors, about 1,240 were killed in service, 18,500 died from disease (mostly scurvy) and another 42,000 reportedly deserted.
• Figures for casualties among other fighting groups (Germans, French, Spanish, Loyalists, British regulars, and Native Americans) are not known.

Rights, even inalienable ones, cost. We may not have paid those costs personally, but someone did. That is what gives them value. It is as true at the personal level as the political. Not claiming our rights costs too, as we choose to suffer in relationships, companies and societies where we cannot flourish rather than pay the costs for our personal freedom.

One of the core precepts of the Wheel of Creativity is that dissolution of old forms is absolutely necessary for the creation of something new. Dissolution is as much a part of the cycle of creativity as is creation. But real change begins within and spreads out from there. And when we set out on the journey to create a better life, our vision is in fact strengthened by  the resistance of the Status Quo.

The 56 men of the 13 states who signed the declaration we celebrate today knew there would be costs. In the face of that they committed themselves and what they held most dear to each other:

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

We are not alone here. What we do (or don’t do) affects the global community. So, today, as we’re grilling our burgers and slicing the watermelon, let us remember those who made it possible, those around the world who are fighting still, and ourselves as we declare our rights and responsibilities in our own brief time on this Earth.

Happy Independence Day!

Share on Facebook