Cooking Pasta Sauce . . . <\/b><\/p>\n
My mother, of Sicilian ancestry, stood before the stove making sauce for a pasta dinner.\u00a0 She was uneducated — a ninth-grade dropout \u2013 a human being of no recognized distinction by society beyond their ascribed status markers — women, unmarried, middle-aged, lower SE class, white, poor. \u00a0Certainly, she occupied no status as an artist or person of special talent beyond her role as mother and housekeeper.\u00a0 Yet, I believe that her act of cooking pasta sauce reveals the nature of creativity, and why creativity is reflected in all of our behaviors that are permitted to express and demonstrate our individual uniqueness \u2013 our life impulse to make visible and apparent our distinct endowment of life.\u00a0 She used no recipe, each time she cooked pasta the sauce was unique, but each was always tasty and satisfying in their way.\u00a0 There is a lesson in that fact!<\/p>\n
Because of limited scientific and professional views on the nature, description, and demonstration of creative impulses, few scientists or professionals would think of her as being highly creative.\u00a0\u00a0 She speaks as she cooks — smelling and tasting the sauce, adding a bit more garlic, basil, salt, pepper \u2013 a little bit of this, a little bit of that — she smiles and gestures with her hand commenting on various topics as she cooks \u2013 children, family, furniture, a score of memories from days of her youth, she jokes and offers wisdom.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s cooking, in this moment, is an entire \u201ccreative\u201d package, deserving of praise, recognition, and insight. As while my mother brings dimensions of her person \u2013 inherited and acquired (i.e., values, style, skills) to her cooking, she is engaging in creativity \u2013 she is evidencing the life impulse to interact within a situation to encourage, facilitate, improve, expand her individual and our collective effort as human beings after existence.\u00a0 She will receive a hug and kiss, and gestures of gratitude and appreciation from those who eat her pasta sauce.\u00a0 She will smile, and dismiss the words with modesty.\u00a0 In those moments, however, there is so much to grasp and understand about \u201ccreativity\u201d in our daily, and how widespread it is, and how much we need to do to encourage and sustain creativity because it is life itself, present in each of us as carriers of the life impulse.<\/p>\n
Rethinking Creativity . . . <\/b><\/p>\n
I say this because, in my opinion, we have become caught in our conventional views regarding the nature of creativity \u2013 its sources, manifestations, and consequences. As psychologists, we have defined creativity, measured it, appraised and evaluated it \u2013 and in the process \u2013 restrained its meaning and implications. Unfortunately, we make far too many distinctions between \u201ccreative\u201d and \u201cnon-creative\u201d people, focusing on the wonderful talents of artists, poets, and scientists whose contributions are, indeed, awe inspiring and deserving of reverential praise and respect.\u00a0 But, I believe we are missing a very important point.<\/p>\n
Creativity is inherent in the life impulse itself!\u00a0 It is present in all forms and expressions of life that exist across the diversity spectrum from microscopic organisms to exceptional human beings gifted with special talents and skills that enable them with each work to bring novelty, freshness, and wide-spread appeal to their \u201ccreations.\u201d \u00a0Life is creativity, I say again and again, and when we insist on homogenized standards and conformity in behavior via various societal institutions we are, in fact, losing the wonderful evolutionary gift to recognize and to respond to the essential need for diversity.<\/p>\n
We ask why our schools are failing, and we provide hundreds of answers to the problem.\u00a0 Yet, too often, we forget that our schools have become institutions that are part of a larger system societal system, in which maintaining the system\u2019s order and coherence is more important than the students and their unique needs.\u00a0 I recognize the burdens we face — especially education system costs, crowded classes, problem students, inadequate teachers, and teaching processes that are geared toward mass education, and cannot accommodate individual lives \u2013 even as our impulses are good and well-intentioned.\u00a0 Yet, if we proceed from the needs of a system to perpetuate itself at any cost, can we begin the process of change?<\/p>\n
Lifeism<\/b><\/p>\n
In essays I have written about \u201clifeism,\u201d I have come to see — creatively — that creativity abounds all around us. It is the effort after expression within the limitations of its setting and resources; it is the effort to survive, and to become all we can be within the situation.\u00a0\u00a0 In my writings on \u201clifeism,\u201d I have come to see that a \u201cweed\u201d can be motivated by hope to exist \u2013 to survive — under brutal conditions.\u00a0 This is true for all living organisms, and within limitations, each effort to express uniqueness is a creative act.\u00a0 Thus, for me, at this point in my thinking, all expressions reflect creativity (e.g., clothes, speech, gait, movement, style).\u00a0 They are simply, or complexly, an organism\u2019s covert and overt demonstration of its contribution to diversity.<\/p>\n
I will close with an editorial comment that I have come to see is a critical challenge in our global era.\u00a0 Diversity, as a manifestation of life, is present and widespread.\u00a0 But there are forces, events, and people in positions of power that are destroying diversity in favor of homogenization of our world \u2013 our cultures, our environments, and even, human nature. Diversity, through life itself, is considered too difficult to accommodate by those in power, and so they are seeking to move us toward uniformity and conformity.\u00a0 How much easier to control!\u00a0 How much easier to dominate!\u00a0 Consider the pantheon of \u201cBig\u201d in our world today \u2013 Big Pharm, Big Ag, Big Energy, Big Transportation, Big Education, Big Auto, Big Med, Big Government, Big Military, and \u201cBanks too Big to Fail,\u201d so\u00a0 they remain in control of our lives and life.\u00a0 Everything is moving toward massive and disproportionate levels of control \u2013 monopolies of products, person, society, nation, and world.\u00a0 These monopolies destroy life because of their power to impose self-serving interests \u2013 their recipes for preserving power, position, and wealth.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I fear, had my mother lived in coming decades, they would have destroyed her unique and distinct creative impulses in cooking and other avenues of her expression that did not follow recipes imposed on life. Their acts restrict evolutionary possibilities of life to a limited future under their control and service.\u00a0 Dystopia!\u00a0 \u00a0Buon appetito!\u00a0 Manga!\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
___________________________<\/p>\n
Anthony Marsella, Ph.D., a\u00a0 member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Diversity, though life itself, is considered too difficult to accommodate, and so they are moving us toward, uniformity and conformity. How easier to control! How much easier to dominate! Consider the pantheon of \u201cBig\u201d in our world today \u2013 Big Pharm, Big Ag, Big Energy, Big Transportation, Big Education, Big Auto, Big Med, Big Government, Big Military, and \u201cBanks too Big to Fail,\u201d so they remain in control of our lives and life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}