Part Four: What Do We Create?

“I think we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.” – Joanne Harris

What things have you built?  Creating things may not be a full measure of goodness, but the things we build are certainly part of our legacy as humans and part of leading a full life.  As a child, maybe you played with Legos, erected sand castles, or created an entire online world for yourself in a game like Sims.  Why do you think you are drawn to do those kinds of things?

Dr. Nathan Lents claims that our capacity and desire to be creative is one of the traits that distinguishes humans from other mammals. In all of culture, going back thousands of years, we find traces of art.

In a previous unit, we looked at Maslow’s pyramid, and if you recall, creativity was at the very top in the part known as self-actualization.  In other words, creativity is one of the highest human activities we engage in throughout our lives.

Our desire to create things and engage in artistic pursuits might be related to our fascination with beauty.  We are instinctively drawn to beauty in the form of appreciating a beautiful sky, snowstorm, or landscape in nature or in the form of people we find beautiful.

It’s not just our goodness that we measure in terms of what we create.  We can also measure our sense of legacy. We are drawn not just to appreciate beautiful things, but to create beautiful things as well as a monument to the lives we have lived and a record of what we have loved.  Creating something (a family, a business, the Great American Novel) is how we weave ourselves and the story of our lives into the fabric of all human experience.