Are you listening?

The first step to creativity is to be in a state of awareness and listen to your instincts

Can I be creative as a housewife, wonders Guneeta Mehra. Why not Guneeta? In fact, you represent the epitome of Creativity in whatever you do at home! Don’t you think up ways to beautify your home, cook up new recipes from leftovers for your family, find newer and newer ways of managing your kids?

Creativity can pop up anywhere, anytime. Sometimes it’s just Serendipity. What is serendipity? Well, it was voted one of the ten English words that are hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. (For the record Serendip is the old Persian name for Sri Lanka).

In movies you often see a scientist or inventor working hard for years on end until he, or she, as with physicist Marie Curie, finally makes a great discovery that wins the Nobel Prize. 

In real life, it’s not only about hard work or genius; sometimes its luck, that leads to a new invention or a scientific breakthrough. When that happens, that’s one manifestation of serendipity.

One of the most famous examples of serendipity is one of the oldest. Hiero II, king of the ancient Greek city of Syracuse (now Sicily), suspected his new crown wasn’t pure gold. People then knew how much gold weighed, so if the weight of the crown matched the weight of an equal volume of gold, the metal was pure. The problem: there was no way to calculate the volume of an irregularly shaped object, such as a crown.

One day Archimedes got into an full bathtub, and some water spilled out. And, in that everyday act, he realized that the volume of the water that escaped the tub was exactly equal to how much of him was submerged. That meant he could figure out the volume of anything, no matter how irregular its size, by immersing it, and measuring the amount of water displaced.

 Archimedes is said to have been so excited by this discovery that he ran through the street, naked as he was, shrieking “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I have found it!”). Archimedes was thinking about whether the king was getting ripped off or not when he got into his bathtub; his discovery was serendipitous. 

So too, the re-discovery of North America by Christopher Columbus, who was actually looking for a new way to India or Isaac Newton’s famed apple falling from a tree, which led to his formulating the theory of gravitation.

I am sure you must have had a similar experience some time or the other in your own life.
(As an aside, if serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, the term “zemblanity” was coined to mean somewhat the opposite of serendipity: “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design”.)

There are some simple ways in which you can maximize the serendipity in your life. To start with, be in a state of awareness and readiness to expect the unexpected. Examine any seemingly chance event, explore why it happened and its significance in your life. Trust your instinct and inner voice. Creativity is about listening, and then acting in untraditional ways. 

You only have to believe. When you accept the possibility of serendipity, you will begin to notice it everywhere. Once you open your mind to its gifts, things that seemed impossible earlier will “pop up” around you. Your creativity will flow. 

On a more spiritual note, experience life with serenity. Accept all the events in your life with equanimity and let them flow. When you try to force things, they stop happening the way they were meant to happen. Creativity thrives when you do not hold it too tightly. Just go with the flow.

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Thought for the Week

“In the field of observation, 
chance favours only the prepared mind.”
Louis Pasteur
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times