Recently, watched this TED talk by famous author Elizabeth Gilbert, and found it really interesting. She expressed her views on a much discoursed topic- how creativity and suffering are related. You meet a person and ask him what you want to be. There's a very low chance that you'll hear something like I want to be a writer or artist or musician or anything that requires mainly of creativity. And there's a high chance you will suspect his or her sanity.
In my opinion intelligence and creativity follow different functionality of the thought process. If quoted in a single sentence- intelligence is the convergence process of various data or premises resulting into a conclusion. While creativity is divergence process of a conclusion to various premises or forms. If you got me what I just tried to explain, kudos to me.
Creative people are always surrounded by questions like- aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid of the humiliation of rejection? Aren't you afraid that you'll work for whole life with this craft and nothing ever going to come you? And the simple answer to it is, YES, they all are.
The most tormenting thought is being crushed by your own success. Most of the anxiety and restlessness come from the thought that will I be ever to do better than this. Often these magnificent creative minds can't bear and die young and often at their own hands. Its not a big surprise, because from ages we have been hearing that creativity and suffering are inherently related.
So what's next? Is this notion be the end for all creative minds out there? Elizabeth came with a promising concept of demons or creative spirits. And this is a old one- even Romans and Greece followed it. People believed that creativity did not come from the individual but a distant source of energy- called the demons or the creative spirits. But as the renaissance came. We had the big idea of science. Every aspect of life started being reasoned. This was the time when we started believing that the individual itself was a genius than having a genius and this was where everything went wrong.
The thoughts in a creative writing, the charm in some of the greatest musical works, the profoundness in a artists work sometimes crosses all the limits of human believes and it becomes a wonderment to even the creator about its origin. The weight of this divine energy is too heavy for the creator to account for. This is like asking man to swallow the sun. All this creates unimaginable expectations. And the pressure of that is responsible for all the suffering.
So why not consider it that way, why not account for that distant energy which every creator feels, as if someone is helping out with our work. Gilbert quoted with the example of a famous poet Ruth Stone. Ruth said she heard fragments of poem(coming with the wind) while working in the fields, and she had to run down her cottage to grab a pen and a paper to write it down before she missed it. To increase your amazement she also mentioned that once she almost missed the lines but grabbed the tail of the lines in the air and wrote it as it was word by word on paper but backwards, from the last word to first!
