by Michael Kryton

Created on: April 21, 2008

To unlock the meaning or to understand the manifestation of creativity begins with an understanding of one's own nature of creativity. To do that, one must reflect on one's past experiences albeit that a little personal history always hurts or humbles.

Your own history has left powerful implants that are hard wired to your imagination. How has your life experience affected your own creativity or how you understand the meaning of creativity? The idea here is to find out and change it or enhance it. Resurrect it. Improve it. Unleash it. DO it!

Up to the age of 5 (more or less), a child's natural creativity is influenced by Mom and Dad, siblings, as well as the pre-school environment and the first friends in life. There are other influences, but there are books out there that flesh it out with authority. I assume you get the point.

After the 5th year, things really change. We begin to remember more things we see and hear. The values we place on these things vary, but they guide our thinking, feeling and imagination. More importantly, we begin to make more defined creative choices.

Our first, more defined creative experiences happen when we play or pretend as children. In other words, we start to move from playing randomly as toddlers with something designed for a simple purpose - such as grabbing something and winging it across the room or shaking a noise maker - to creating simple stories often incorporating toys or props.

Within those stories we become something: a character or simply the force behind the manifestation, such as the hand that moves a racing car or the hand that moves the doll, and the voice that speaks its thoughts.

Of course, at that point in our growth, we don't suddenly stop and say, "Gee, I'm creative." It comes out more as, "Look at what I did with Sparky, Mom." And it is Mom who, after savoring the image of Sparky dressed as the big bad wolf and strapped to a toy stroller, will say, "Gee honey, that's very creative." The truth is, the child won't really understand what Mom meant. What they want to hear is, "Wow, Sparky looks like the big bad wolf. Well done!" For children, it's about the result as much as it is about the recognition; it's about validation on several levels. But, hey, I'm a writer, not Freud.

If you could remember your first creative experiences - who you pretended to be or what role you took on within creative games, what you played with, where you played - if you could connect the dots backwards, as Stephen Jobs has remarked, what parts of your creative experiences would you discover have manifested themselves in your life today? If you are able to answer that question, then, perhaps, you are very much connected to the meaning of creativity that matters in your life.

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