How would YOU define creativity?

 

I was brushing my teeth this morning when the question suddenly hit me: What is creativity? Of course, we all have a vague concept in our minds about what it is. Merriam Webster defines it as “the quality of being creative; the ability to create”. But when I chose the overall topic of my blog posts, I hadn’t really thought about what my own definition of creativity is. For me, creativity is not one concrete, tangible thing. It’s more like an umbrella term that unites several concepts.

Something for the weariness

Something for the weariness

I didn’t use to understand why people hated  the newspaper. Their repeated use of phrases like “the same old bull” or “great, more messiness” when confronted with the news of the day astonished and slightly annoyed me. I figured that there must be a lack of interest at the root of this aversion, a badly disguised insularity that penetrated people’s thinking like a tumor. And I took pride in the fact that I, who had previously had his awakening to the sheer infinity of interesting facts and narratives the big, wide world offered, was different. I would not close my eyes to the truth, I would not shy away from the occasional ugliness of the world, I would take up the responsibility of knowing.

Henchman's medicine

Henchman’s medicine

According to a recent article on derStandard.at, the European Union is considering a “Marshall Plan” to boost its nations’ struggling economies. The measure would raise up to 200 billion euros to be invested in infrastructure, renewable energy and “key technologies”.

This doesn’t sound bad. After years of frugality-talk and fiscal hawkishness, the possibility that governments might actually take some money and invest it in the real economy instead of flushing it down the financial market's drain feels like a fresh breeze of sanity in a crisis that has so far been dominated by political cowardice and perplexity.

If the article had ended right there, one might have been able to indulge in a small amount of optimism that seems so hard to come by these days. Unfortunately, the article goes on to describe where the money needed for this would come from. The proposal suggests that 12 billion euros be taken from the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism in order to raise private capital on behalf of the European Investment Bank using "complicated financial instruments". If this was a farce, it couldn't have been better put.