Natural talent
I watched the documentary Beach Boys and Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road. A really good and fascinating portrait of a true genius.
To say he’s had a hard life would be an understatement. His challenges are on a scale most of us can hardly imagine.
But there’s one thing that has always been there for him, like a close companion — a buoy to cling to when the sea is rough:
Music.
When he talks about his music, and art in general, he says:
It’s very personal and something that comes naturally. A natural thing.
Those words could almost serve as the definition of creativity in a dictionary. It’s natural, not forced. And it’s personal, shaped by the person through whom it flows.
It made me think of the phrase natural talent. We often imagine it as someone being born with extraordinary abilities. But is that really the case?
Maybe these people are simply more open and receptive — and often a bit introverted at the same time (life’s little paradoxes) — to the natural creativity that wants to be expressed. A gateway to inspiration, a word that actually comes from the Latin for “bringing something to life.”
I remember a TED talk where the speaker mentioned a poet who could almost see inspiration flying toward her. If she was out in the field, she’d turn around and run back to her desk to make sure she didn’t miss it.
That kind of intensity is rare... thankfully. But maybe we can all try to be a bit more sensitive. To think more in terms of something created through us rather than by us.
A subtle but important difference.