“A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what a ship was designed for.” Anonymous
Creativity and bravery are so closely connected that I personally believe that bravery could almost be another word for creativity!
Creativity is changing the status quo, thinking independently, and going against conventions. All of this demand’s bravery.
We live in an age of anxiety. We hear about terrorism, climate change or wars daily, and we fear. It affects our ability to think, make decisions and take risks. Fear turns us into the hollow functionaries and stops us from getting what we want from life. We desperately need bravery. To be human is to be brave.
Bravery is not the absence of fear but rather the ability to move through it creatively – with new ideas and visions.
But … can we learn bravery? Yes, if we are brought up creatively from an early age. If we as children lack the creative experience – opportunities to be curious and try new things – we learn fear instead.
A creative upbringing masters our courage. It helps us to adequately cope with problems and overcome obstacles. To learn to be resourceful, resilient and confident. To express ideas and improve self-esteem. Practising creativity is practising the act of bravery.
If you are a parent, what can you do for your children today? Nurture their creativity. Encourage children to invent, experiment and imagine. Challenge them to think up new and unexpected ways that solve problems in daily life, science, technology or even business. Approve their ideas, however, ‘bizarre’ or ‘impractical’ they might be. The most common answer of people to ‘what are you fearful of?’ is ‘the unknown’. Creativity by definition is going into the unknown. Allow your children to explore it.
Encourage them to play, to do arts. Arts are the best way to foster creativity in the young. Ask them to draw, paint, dance, perform or write stories. Let their art explorations be spontaneous and rich in fantasy rather than imitate nature. And the best thing, you do not need money or training for this, just a change of attitude.
Some parents and teachers might think that encouraging creativity in children – new ideas and their independent mind – can be a threat to their authority. Fear not. Creativity is constructive and altruistic, not destructive.
When it is accepted and rewarded, creativity never makes children hostile or delinquent. On the contrary, according to researchers’ young people are likely to become delinquent or emotionally disturbed when their creativity is suppressed.
Matisse famously says: Creativity takes courage. Joseph Chilton Pearce adds: To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. Picasso adds to that: The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.