If you know me well, you must suspect that this post is about exercise. It's not. Though it's a well-known fact that we must continue to use our body or lose some of its functions, in this post I am referring to creativity. I recently read (in an article that I clipped for reference and then lost at the hairdresser's) that creativity stops developing in the brain at about the age of twelve. If we don't continue to exercise that mental muscle, we are frozen at a twelve-year-old's capacity.
Children do have great imaginations, and it's not awful to have a tween's inventiveness, but what a loss if we do not take our creativity beyond that point, if we can't develop our interests in art or music or writing past a seventh grade perspective. When I read the article I felt a zing of its truth. I have blogged before that my own creative ambitions towards poetry and writing stopped by the beginning of high school, when recognition and rewards went to the best essay, research paper, or grammar exercises. My creative juices have been frozen for several decades; I put them in deep freeze while I raced from task to task on my agenda. Maybe it's time to thaw them out - and then drink that kool-aid.
Time to rewrite the script. I'm assigning myself the job of writing and research, and clearing my plate for the next year so that I can develop those muscles. If I died tomorrow, that's the one big regret I would have - that I stopped pursuing the creative dreams at age twelve. I hope my readers find time to do the same for their own creative endeavors. The world needs all our points of view, our cumulative flights of fancy and colorful aspirations. Cheers to seeing what creativity looks like from the age of forty and beyond!
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