Unlike most people, creative people do not allow their minds to become passive, accepting, unquestioning. They manage to keep their curiosity burning, or at least to rekindle it. One aspect of this intellectual dynamism is playfulness. Like little children with building blocks, creative people love to toy with ideas, arranging them in new combinations, looking at them from different perspectives.
It was such activity that
Isaac Newton was referring to when he wrote,
“I do not know what I may appear
to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the
seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding… a smoother pebble or a
prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.”
Albert Einstein was
willing to speculate further. He saw such playfulness as “the essential feature in
productive thought.” But whatever the place of playfulness among the
characteristics of creative people, one thing is certain: it provides those
people a richer and more varied assortment of ideas than the average person
enjoys.
Lord, Give
Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)
Taken from Vincent Ryan Ruggiero’s The
Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought (8th
Edition), (United States: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007) pg. 90
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