What an illustration of creative wisdom at work to bring a solution to a food shortage crisis. You see great leaders, groups and individual can exercise creative wisdom at the spur of the moment. In this scenario, the man who was able to give a little bread and fish to several thousand individuals knew exactly what he was going. He had personal insight on how to make this thing work. He exercise creative wisdom, did his thing and the food multiplied. He was able to feed all five thousand individuals with leftovers after they had eaten. Notice what he also did. He organized the crow of five thousand and asked them to seat down. This is a demonstration of how creative wisdom works. There is often a situation, a limitation or lack of sufficient resources, a courageous individual who figures out internally what to do with the lack of resources and limitation and an execution of the resources to meet the current need creatively by that individual. Most times after an operation of creative wisdom, there are not only resources adequate to meet the current need but leftovers and surpluses that can be used at a future time.
I have arrived at the keen realization that great leaders are also great listeners. The man in illustration first spoke about the pressing need to feed five thousand individuals who had invited themselves to follow him without his invitation. In modern times we will be quick to label this as a crisis. But see how he handled the situation. He asked his aides relevant questions and listened to his aides about the various resources available. He also made the connections, comparisons and analogies and personally uncovered hidden things about the whole situation without saying a word to any of his aides. He finally executed based on his internal, personal insight and conviction and the food shortage problem was taken care of. He started with the art of listening and asking the relevant questions, connecting the dots. This though simple was a profound act that put him on the frequency of operating in creative wisdom.
My message today is a simple one all individuals and leaders desirous of operating in creative wisdom should – settle down and listen more. The best leaders are proactive, strategic, and intuitive listeners. They recognize knowledge and wisdom are not gained by simply talking or reading, but by listening.
I know of a surety that creativity is often a compelling or attractive lifestyle or state of being that everyone admires. Operating in Creative Wisdom takes it further. It is a practical sustainable lifestyle where an individual or group engages in consistent lifestyle that promotes and exemplifies creativity, generated by acts of wisdom. The anatomy of Creative Wisdom is simply an exploration of the structure and relationship between creativity and wisdom. The chapters of this book simplify and present creative wisdom as not only a lifestyle but as a tool for creating an internal sustainable atmosphere of wisdom and creativity through the art of reading and listening. Because listening is a valuable art of creative wisdom practitioner’s life-giving confessions, declarations and affirmations based on the established principles of the creator’s manual making creativity and wisdom accessible to every individual who has access to this work. There's no better source for both practical and spiritual wisdom than the time-tested knowledge found in the power of creative wisdom.
Grand Vision – Tiny Wallets
Creative wisdom or creativity begins with an affinity for something. I have discovered that it is akin or similar to falling in love. From my little experience I have discovered that most individuals who exhibit creative wisdom feel a kind of an emotional connection to something.
For instance Albert Einstein’s fascination with physics began when he was just five when he was ill in bed. His father brought him a present… small magnetic compass. For hours, Einstein lay in bed entranced by the needle that infallibly pointed the way north. When he was close to seventy, Einstein said. “This experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”
Such childhood moments are key to understanding creative wisdom. Without that initial love and emotional connection, the chances of manifesting creative wisdom later are minimal. But the initial enthrallment or intoxication is not enough. What it does is that it essentially moves you to learn more about the thing that first interests you and to discover its complexities, its difficulties, it strengths, weaknesses and obscurities. From that initial love comes persistence. People who care passionately about what they are doing don’t give up easily. When frustration or challenge come they persist. When people are resistant to their innovation they keep going anyway. Sticking to it is what Thomas Edison calls genius
Deaf and blind, Helen Keller was cut off from the world and human contact until Anne Sullivan came along. Sullivan’s creativity lay in her passion and her refusal to give up. She persisted in her determination to reach Helen.
Years later, Helen Keller recalled that first moment when that persistence, love and passion bore fruit. “My teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan has been with me nearly a month and she taught me the names of a number of objects. She could put then into my hand, spell out their names with her fingers and helped me form the letters. But I didn’t have the faintest idea of what she was doing. I do not know what I thought. I only had a tactile memory of my fingers going through the motions and changing from one position to another. One day she handed me a cup and spelled the word. Then she poured some liquid into the cup and spelled the letters W-A-T-E-R. She says I looked puzzle. I was confusing the two words, spelling cup for water and water for cup. Finally I became angry because Miss Sullivan kept repeating the words over and over. In despair she led me out to the ivy –covered pump house and made me hold the cup under the spout while she pumped. In her other hand she spelled W-A-T-E-R emphatically. I stood still. My whole body fixed on the motion of her fingers. As the cool stream flowed over my hand, all at once there was a strange stir within me, a sense of something remembered. It was as if I had come back to life after being dead.”
The potential for creative wisdom is always present. Creativity wisdom does not wane as life goes on. Old paint as it ages sometimes becomes transparent. When it happens it is possible in some pictures to see the original lines. For instance, a tree will show through a woman’s dress. A child will make way for a dog. Perhaps it will be appropriate to say that the old conception was replaced by a later choice. It is a way of seeing and then seeing again.
People say if only I had the talent to draw. Well I say. You’ve got it. Because once you’ve got the urge and you start, it’s all mechanical after that. The only thing that is not mechanical is the creative wisdom you use to think out the problem or challenge. Creative wisdom is very important in one’s life. It gives you a platform for diversity of means, resources and operations. When operating in creative wisdom you try different ways of doing things. You naturally make lots of mistakes. But if you have the courage to stay with it despite your mistakes, you will get the answer.
You see our lives can be filled with seeds of creative wisdom, whatever we do as long as we are flexible and open to new possibilities and willing to push back beyond the routine.
Consider the myriad of creative wisdom:
1.Bright ideas that get out of a logiam , like figuring out how to squeeze three more feet of close space out of your bedroom or how to pack more time into your day to exercise, without giving up any of the other things you have to or love to do.
2.Grand visions of hope and truth that show the way to others, -the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg address, Martin Luther Kings “I have a dream” speech.
3.The imaginative expression of caring and compassion: meals on wheels that bring food to the homebound, birthing rooms, the Aids Quilt, Gandhi’s strategy of protesting injustice with nonviolence.
Whether great or small, each of these examples point to the essence of creative wisdom, one that is both novel and appropriate. The everyday expression of creative wisdom takes the form of trying out a new approach to a familiar dilemma.
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