Pondering creativity and the enjoyment of tres leches cake…

November 25, 2009 by Angry Black Bitch

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity

Shall we?

Last Friday a bitch had the rare pleasure of seeing my sister give a presentation at St. Louis University. I’m ridiculously proud of my sis for a lot of reasons…one being her ability to share knowledge and inspire others. After seeing her presentation on strategic planning, my respect for her skills has only grown.

C-Money’s talk included her showing the students Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at the TED Conference on the topic of creativity.

If you haven’t seen it give it a look here…’tis worth it, trust a bitch.

Robinson’s talk is about creativity and how traditional public schools stifle the hell out of it if not outright kill it.

Much has been made over the need to reform public school education in America. I’m a product of a public school education and I agree that a lot of shit needs to be fixed, the sooner the better. But I’m not for tossing the notion of public school out the window entirely…in a world where many do not get any schooling because education is seen as a privilege rather than a right, I know that one of America’s great achievements is that we have a public education system. And in this nation, where many would like to see education become yet another exclusive playground of the rich, the masses need to defend the structure and advocate for remodeling the hell out of it…this bitch is pretty damned sure that many of those pushing to tear the things down are also preparing to lobby against building a damn thing up to replace it.

***pause, sip a rather exception cup of coffee (two teaspoons REAL sugar with a splash of 2% yummified milk = joy), continue***

Having said all that, the current beast is anti-creativity…and, in many ways, that’s a reflection of American society. I’ve lived a lot of places (Boston, Great Barrington Mass., Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas) and I’ve visited even more…most communities are against creative expression…thought…people…structures…shit, anything different.

And Robinson’s talk reminded a bitch that one of the major reasons communities, organizations and people resist getting their creative on is for fear of fucking shit up.

We are conditioned to stand in front of ourselves when the thing we need to do is get out of our own fucking way.

Now that may seem like the most obvious thing you have ever read…but most of us don’t confront that reality enough.

We just don’t.

We look at beautiful, passionate and wild pieces of art…creations that stir our blood and damn near move us to tears…and appreciate them, yet we scoff at the idea that we (me, myself…I) have something like that struggling for freedom within ourselves.

So, while the blessed few among us who are able to defeat our fear and experience creativity go about the bitness of making and eating sumptuous cakes, the rest of us eat crackers…all because we afraid to risk fucking a few cakes up before we get that shit right.

Because society punishes the creative among us when they do fuck up…because deep down in the core of too many of us is a resentment toward those pretty ass cake making motherfuckers.

It took me years to see that shit for what it really is…the conditioning to conform that is drilled into all of us for so long that we’ve incorporated it into our flesh.

That fear is us (me, myself…I) standing in the way of our own ass getting our creativity on.

Because we don’t want anyone to laugh at us…to mock our fashion sense…to spit out a cake we’ve worked so hard on…to hate on us…to piss in our Corn Flakes…to kill our joy.

For fear of all that…we don’t dance, we buy clothes that everyone else is buying and eat crackers when we’re dying for some tres leches yummified cake.

We cast a safe vote on health care reform instead of the right vote…we don’t even eat Corn Flakes anymore and haven’t experienced joy in so long that we wouldn’t even miss it but for those damn creative folks out there flaunting their happiness all the motherfucking time.

Can a bitch get an amen?

Shit.

I don’t know about y’all but this bitch needed to be reminded of that…big time.

Many thanks to my sister C-Money for that reminder and so much more…and congrats to her for a kick ass talk that I know touched more than one person in attendance.

Get your creativity on, y’all…get wild with it, go ahead and fuck shit up and learn from that…get out of the way of your own damn self.

Shit.

Now I’m craving tres leches cake…