Creativity is the answer to the question: how do we ensure our future?

I’ve been thinking about this since I wrote a piece for Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Ceremonial Magick on the future of magic. Just now there is a great deal of fear about the future and a number of grim predictions about the death of the human race and the extinguishment of life on the planet. It is quite clear that we need to wake up, pay attention, and make immediate changes to our way of life to avert the catastrophes we foresee. How are we going to do that?

Sir Ken Robinson has an idea. Speaking at the end of a conference on the future, he made a case for completely revamping education. Our approach to schooling developed in the mid eighteen hundreds to prepare children for life in the industrial world. It is exactly the industrial world that has brought us to the brink of destruction. We need to transition to a different way of relating to the natural world and to each other. Doing that requires nurturing what we’ve been suppressing: creativity.

Art is not the least important thing we do, it is the most important. Many of us create in the leftover minutes after we’ve done our work-for-pay, household chores, relationship effort. What if we made art the first priority? The work-for-pay and chores and loving still need to get done, but maybe the house can be a little more messy and the family can learn some new skills. We can take that creativity time and put a fence around it: this is the most uninterruptible hour of the day, this weekend retreat is sacrosanct, this art is our most valuable contribution to the world.

Art is also not limited to a certain class of people. A new word has popped into my news feed, “creatives”. People identify as creators of art and insist that art is important. I absolutely agree. However every single human being has the capacity to think and innovate and make. There isn’t any special category of gifted people. The opposite of creative is “discouraged”. As Sir Robinson says, all of us started out as creative children and got squashed along the way. Our job is to recover from that, to give ourselves permission to make mistakes and learn and grow, to let ourselves enjoy making again.

Do you create art? Create! Has it been a while since you made something? What was the last thing you remember creating that you loved? Do that. Make a doodle on paper, bake a cake mix and decorate it with sprinkles, play a song and dance. Creating anything connects us to the energy of life, and that is exactly what we need to do to create a livable common future.