Thursday, April 03, 2014

What differentiates a creative genius from ordinary people?

It's often difficult to justify the way that I am and the value of what I do. To the untrained eye I appear to be doing very little with my life. However these wise words from Dorothea Brande's 1934 book on Becoming A Writer sum it up very well I think: 
“The genius (for the sake of mistaken delusions of grandeur, lets replace genius with creative) keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world. Many of us keep this responsiveness well into adolescence; very few mature men and women are fortunate enough to preserve it in their routine lives. Most of us are only intermittently aware, even in youth, and the occasions which adults see and feel and hear with every sense alert become rarer and rarer with the passage of years.

Too many of us allow ourselves to go about wrapped in our personal problems, walking blindly though our days with our attention all given to some pretty matter of no particular importance. The true neurotic may be engrossed in a problem so deeply buried in his being that he could not tell you what it is that he is contemplating, and the sign of his neurosis is his ineffectiveness in the real world.

The most normal of us allow ourselves to become so insulated by habit that few things can break through our preoccupations except truly spectacular events - a catastrophe happening under our eyes, our indolent strolling blocked by a triumphal parade; it must be a matter which challenges us in spite of ourselves.” 
This is also one of many reasons I love spending so much time with my daughter. Remember, we are all born with infinite potential, it's only as we get older that most of us forget how to tap into it!

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