an ancient poem about this unfinished world we call home. In this poem there are stars and fish and earth and birds and animals and oceans, and they’re all in the endless process of becoming. It’s not just a tree, it’s a tree that produces fruit that contains seeds that will eventually grow new trees that will produce new fruit that contains more seeds to make more new trees. It’s a world exploding with life and beauty and complexity and diversity, all of it making more, becoming and evolving in such a way that tomorrow will be different from today because it’s all headed somewhere. Nothing is set in stone or static here; the whole thing is in motion, flush with vitality and pulsing with creative energy. (This poem, by the way, is the first chapter of the Bible, in case any of this is starting to sound familiar.)
And then, right there in the middle of all of this unfinished creation, the poet tells us about a man and a woman. The man’s name is Adam, which means The Human in the original Hebrew language. It’s not a common name like you and I have, it’s more like a generic description. Same with the woman, whose name is Eve, which means Source of Life or Mother of the Living.
They find themselves in the midst of this big, beautiful, exotic, heartbreaking, mysterious, endlessly becoming, unfinished world and they’re essentially told,
Do something with it!
Make something!
Take it somewhere!
Enjoy it!
The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world. To turn this story into a debate about whether or not Adam and Eve were real people or to read this poem as a science textbook is to miss the provocative, pointed, loaded questions that the poem asks:
What will Adam and Eve do with this extraordinary opportunity?
What kind of world will they help make?
Where will they take it?
What will they do with all this creative power they’ve been given?
It’s a poem about them, but it asks questions about all of us:
What will we make of our lives?
What will we do with our energies?
What kind of world will we create?
Which leads to the penetrating question for every one of us—including you:
What will you do with your blinking line?
You create your life.
You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something. And you have way more power to do this than you realize.
What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.
All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.
There’s a great Latin phrase that helps me make sense of the wonder and weirdness of creating a life. Ex nihilo means out of nothing. I love this phrase because you didn’t used to be here. And I wasn’t here either. We didn’t used to be here. And then we were here. We were conceived, we were birthed, we arrived.
Out of nothing came … us.
You.
Me.
All of us.
All of it.
There is an ex nihilo-ness to everything, and that includes each of us.
Who of us can make sense of our own existence?
Have you ever heard an answer to the question How did we get here? that even remotely satisfied your curiosity? (Is this why kids shudder when they think of their parents having sex? Because we get here through some very mysterious and unpredictable biological phenomena involving swimming and winning? … Our very origins are shrouded in strangeness. You and I are here, but we were almost not here.)
My friend Carlton writes and produces television shows and sometimes I watch his shows and I’ll say to him, How did you come up with that? Where did that come from? We’ll be laughing and I’ll say, What is going on inside your head that you can make this stuff up?
Have you ever encountered something that another human being made and thought, How did she do that? Where did that come from?
When I was in high school my neighbor Tad, the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience) gave me two ceramic heads that he had made. One head is green and has a smiling face, and the other head is brown and has a frowning face. They are very odd sculptures. But at the time he gave them to me I was mesmerized.
You can do that?
You can take a pile of clay and break it in two and then mold it and work with it and make that?
As a seventeen-year-old I was flabbergasted with the ex nihilo-ness of what Tad had made.
He just sat down and came up with that?
(By the way, he gave them to me in 1988. I still have them; they’re on the wall next to the desk where I’m writing this book. Twenty-eight years later.)
The ex nihilo-ness of art and design and music and odd sculptures and bizarre television shows reminds us of the ex nihilo-ness of our lives—we come out of nothing. And we’re here. And we get to make something with what we’ve been given.
Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us:
What kind of world are we making?
Which always leads to the pressing personal question:
What kind of life am I creating?
Now for some of us, the moment we hear the word create, our first thought is,
But you don’t understand, I’m not the creative type
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