Creativity and Imagination

Creativity and Imagination

by Charlie Smith

I’m one of those troglodytes who still has cable television. Honestly, I don’t know why we pay for it – the only things I watch are sports and local news. One night during the long Christmas-New Year’s break, I was surfing the channels. On a movie channel, to my amazement, The Wizard of Oz was being shown. Seriously? Is that considered a Christmas movie now?

Growing up in Kansas City in the 1960s, The Wizard of Oz was a sure sign of spring and tornado season, shown annually in April. Watching it was a really big deal. A Buick car dealer who lived across the street from us gathered the neighborhood kids together for a party to watch the movie. What made it extra special was that we watched it on a COLOR TV. Remember that scene, after the house was lifted up from Kansas and plopped down into Oz, when Dorothy opens the front door – and everything suddenly changes from black and white to color? “Ahhhhhhh!”

That’s the kind of energy, intelligence and imagination that I hope we might each seek to capture as we enter into 2025. Because let’s face it: We face stiff headwinds. Society at large is frightened and deeply disturbed by such disruptions in the status quo when we open our eyes to new possibilities, doing things differently, looking at things anew with fresh eyes. Taking another road.

Here’s an imaginative thought: “To create is to destroy.” That’s the tag line in a book called Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith. Wreck This Journal gives plenty of suggestions and opportunities to literally wreck and damage the pages of the journal in an attempt to break through the creative process. Among its suggestions: Rub a page with dirt; glue, staple or paste pages together; tie a string to the journal, take it for a walk and drag it. When we learn to get messily creative, the speaker said, then we are able to achieve our life’s mission. The first recommendation for launching this creative destruction is to crack the spine. And when we do that, she said, “maybe we can begin to live recklessly in a way that engages us where we are rooted and calls us to listen to each other.”

That is open-eyed, imaginative living. Seeing things in a brand-new way, doing things we could never have ever imagined doing. Being messily creative and daring. It can be exhilarating, and it can be scary. But it is, I believe, worth our effort. Just imagine!”Ahhhhhhhhh!”