Kingdom Journalism

Recapture Your Creative Spirit

• Posted by Steve K. on January 30th, 2007 filed in Getting Things Done
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McNair Wilson is a former Disney Imagineer and a popular public speaker on the subjects of communication, creativity, etc. I’ve heard him speak at several Christian conferences, and I’ve always enjoyed his child-like exuberance and energy. He wrote the following in a recent post on his "Tea with McNair" blog, and I wanted to share it with you as hopefully it will inspire you as it has me:

Everyone is born with a creative spirit. (Now when I say everyone, I am thinking particularly of you, dear reader and Tea sipper.) The anthropologists who roam the earth watching us humans say that in every people group and culture that they have observed, all children are fully creatively expressed by age three.

You and I were singing, dancing, drawing, inventing stories, painting, making up adventures, playing dress up, and more—all by the time we were three years old. We did this all naturally, without parental prodding. It was the work of our creative spirt that we all arrive here with as standard equipment for humans, it is factory installed.

Then, at age five or six (according to our observant anthropologist friends), our natural creativity begins to recede. Not coincidentally this is the time that we begin to live life in rooms with rows of chairs facing the same direction—formal education. It erodes our natural creativity 60 to 70 percent in those early years of schooling. By some estimates most people’s creative spirit is 90% diminished by age twenty!

Give up. Stay in bed. It is too late now.
Or …
You can recapture your creative spirit. Today. Start by taking the risk to believe that it is possible. You are not on the highway alone.
What do you dream, imagine, and hope for? I believe those are all, the still small voice of your creative spirit … shhhh, listen …
“Can I come out and play again? Please.”
Say, “Yes!” Do it now.
Soon the highway to imagination will be full again.
I’ll see you there.