Creativity - by Darylynn Starr Rank
September, 2005

I recently returned from a trip to sunny downtown Baltimore where one of my nieces was getting married. Her sister arrived with my three-year-old great-niece (great? oh, my!), a blonde, ringleted explosion of energy and light. 

The day before the wedding the girls all gathered at the beauty parlour for hair and nails, a time-honoured female tradition. The earnest selection of styles and colours for both nails and hair was chaotic to say the least. But the most chaotic was the ringleted, three-year-old flower girl. 

It wasn’t that she couldn’t decide what colour she wanted her nails. It was simply and straightforwardly that she wanted several different colours. “That pretty pink one, there, Mommy. And that purple one. I love that purple one! And that red one. Ohhh, I want that green one that looks like grass.”

I watched her Mother blanch. Try to figure out what to say. She started, then stopped. I wondered how on earth she was going to guide her daughter gently to one single appropriate selection. 

But she smiled at me, purposefully picked up each of the bottles her daughter had selected, and pushed them towards the manicurist. “Put one colour on each of her nails, please,” she requested. “She wants rainbow hands.”  And her daughter beamed.

Later she leaned over to me and confided, “I just kept thinking of the way you talk about creativity, Aunt Dari. And I decided she was simply expressing her love of colours. Just like when she draws! And I didn’t want to tell her that was wrong. So, what the heck? Who cares if she looks a little weird?"

“What the heck, indeed!” I answered her. “I’m proud of you!” Then she beamed.

It was lovely to watch. Jilian, her daughter, showed off her rainbow hands throughout the wedding. And you know what?  Every person who looked at them, grinned. It was adorable. And fun. And utterly creative.

A nice antidote to so many of the stories I hear in my courses on creativity. Those aren’t nearly so encouraging. 

The seventy-year old professional woman who remembered back to when she was in second grade, colouring away joyfully. Her teacher stopped by her desk and asked in a disapproving voice, “What is that?”  “It’s the sky!” she answered. “But the sky is blue!” objected the teacher. There were tears on my student’s face as she remembered the experience. Over sixty years later!

Then there was the young Japanese woman who gave me a lesson in another form of stifling. In her classes the teachers would read a story, then ask what the main character was probably thinking. A perfectly wonderful opportunity to use one’s imagination, I thought. Not so much! The problem? There was only one right answer! It was written down in the instructor’s manual…

I gave that student a homework assignment. She had to go home, pick a moment in a story she liked, and write down what she thought the main character was thinking. But fifteen different thoughts! When she came back a week later and read them to us, she couldn’t stop laughing – with utter joy and freedom.

I hear some lovely stories about how creativity is encouraged in us as children, and even as adults. But I hear far too many of the other experiences. Endless tales of how we get discouraged, shut down, and shut up when we explore our imagination. How we’re disapproved of when we explore our art – that legacy which comes naturally to all of us. 

I hate those stories. No one deserves to lose their creativity. It’s a joyful and integral part of every human being, and of our ability to live harmoniously on this earth. And it depends on being able to do something different. To take a risk, to explore our inner universe. Without being mindlessly crushed by Those Who Know All.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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