This is the last chapter of our 2-year series on creativity and its disorders. My how time flies! There is so much we could still say, but the basic pieces are now there for you to continue considering on your own. If I could leave you with a time-lapse inner monologue summarizing the creative experience of human life, it would go something like this:
Motivation
Appetitive and aversive, approach and avoid, love and hate – this essentially is the underlying theme of life. It may be the theme of more than just human life, too. Humans, chimpanzees, and other primates – in fact, most creatures down through fish and even insects and microbes – cluster together in groups yet compete with one another within the groups: killing each other, hating each other, and avoiding each other, yet remaining within the larger social grouping. This is the paradox of our existence and may be the social need, the insatiable conflict that needs constant soothing.
Part one – I am born – is already skipping a step. In part zero, I am conceived, and in fractional parts up to one, I am undergoing fetal development so that by the time I am born, I already have defined motivations of want and fear. I have yet to perceive, yet to envision, yet to plan, yet to act, yet to manage, yet to socialize, but I have my motivations.
Perception
I am born, and I am alive. My prewired circuits are pulsing with spontaneous activity – spontaneously generated rhythms that are modestly but significantly altered as I perceive the world around me. I see, hear, feel, smell, and taste it. I move and it is altered, even if just a little. I begin to associate things I perceive with my motivations. If I am hungry, milk and food satisfies my hunger and satisfies me. If I am alone, I am afraid, but the arrival of my mother, of someone familiar who feeds me, holds me, and keeps me warm, dispels my fear.
I am getting smart. I feel my hunger, and I remember what makes it better. I envision the arrival of food before it actually comes. I am learning what I want. When I feel afraid, I remember what makes it go away. I envision the arrival of my mother before she even gets there. And I even know if the wrong thing happens. If I am crying because I am hungry and someone gives me a toy, that is not what I want, and it is not what I envisioned. I expected food, and I want food. If the wrong person arrives, some stranger who is not who I expected, that is not who I want. I want my mother.
Action
I am getting really smart. I know when it is lunch time and where the cookies are. I can figure out when to have a snack so I am not too hungry but so I can still eat my dinner at dinnertime. I can even go to the store and get what I want (well, some things anyway, like a pack of gum). But it’s getting harder, more difficult. As I get older, people do not always give me what I want, I have to figure out ways to get things on my own more often. And that requires certain skills, without skills I have no value to trade for money that lets me buy what I want. So I am going to school, I am getting educated, I am working and learning as I work, getting better at what I do. I am getting promoted, I am graduating, I am climbing some kind of "ladder" and the higher I go, the more I can get.