I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
-Ernest Hemingway
Creativity begins with listening – both to yourself and to others. The creative impulse is sparked by your acceptance of a barely-audible hunch – a Glimpse of Possibility that enters your mind so unexpectedly – and by giving yourself permission to explore its unfolding potential. This sudden fleeting thought, might actually be a catalyst to a newly created form.
“If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he certainly meant for us to stick it out,” writer Arthur Koestler has stated. You stuck out your neck, too, when you made your initial creative leap to follow your hunch. By displaying the willingness to suspend judgment just for a while, and enter the barely accessible realms of mystery and ambiguity, you demonstrated courage. You chose to journey into unknown terrain – an essential step in creative thinking.
In HAVE YOU EVER HAD A HUNCH? The Importance of Creative Thinking, I observed: “Many people are more adept at creative thinking than they realize, but haven’t had the opportunity to discover that capacity within themselves, nor sought the adventure (and challenge) of finding answers from within instead of from external sources.” It is important to listen to yourself – and it is also necessary to listen to new information offered by others that might challenge your own comfortably imbedded views, whether it be on Nasal Navigation, Headwhizzing Circumrotation or some Essential Factulation.
A receptivity to new ideas and a willingness to incorporate something novel into your existing thinking, is vital, but only if the information resonates with you after you have listened attentively. Because you will always remain the decision-maker and not simply a person who regurgitates the ideas of others, you can receive and analyze comfortably and confidently, the unfamiliar ideas of many people. Listening is thinking, learning and integrating knowledge into a better whole. It is an ongoing process throughout our lives.
Creating with others whose work and thoughts have value, is also a valuable route to your creative education and to self-discovery. By working collaborative at times, you learn to recognize quality in others – and in yourself – and expect it. There is always so much to learn and absorb! During Spunktaneous’ Apprenticeship in THE WORLD OF GLIMPSE, he too, has so much to learn and absorb when he listens to instructions on:
Nasal Navigation
Perceptual Illumination
Upward Perpendiculation
Creative Bubbulation
Headwhizzing Circumrotation
and Essential Factulation.
It’s that faint small voice that tells you a unique idea. So much negating has gone on under the guise of critical thinking that it is quite difficult to attend to the faint voice in our heads. But attend we must. Let it be heard!!! Very often it is telling us just what we need to hear. The creative idea which provokes and illuminates. How exciting. It is all within us, our own world. Yes, creativity comes from that place that needs affirmation. It strengthens with affirmation too. Thank you Ellen for recognizing and highlighting the importance of that part of us which is so difficult to hear and yet the seed of so much that gives us light in this world.