The Well-Fed Imagination
Robert J. Morgan
Original thinking is seldom original.
—Robert J. Morgan For a long time, I didn't consider myself creative. The very term intimidated me. I'm a traditional guy at heart, a little staid and stuffy. I don't bungee-jump or tie-dye. I prefer Bach to rock, and G. F. Handel to M. C. Hammer. I enjoy the doxology on the Lord's Day, and we still have Sunday night services. But I wasn't always that way. As a child, my imagination resembled a kitten in a room of windup toys. I chased every idea, scratched every itch, and pounced on every adventure. My secondhand bicycle became alternately a helicopter and a powerboat. I unraveled mysteries and swept starlets off their feet. I composed poems and plays. When I lurched into adolescence, my imagination followed like a shadow. It questioned boring traditions, dreaming of better ways and better days. It wondered why no one had ever done a thousand doable things. I was an impressionable teen when Bobby Kennedy campaigned for the presidency with his passionate claim, "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?'" Why, then, twenty years later, didn't I consider myself an innovator? What had happened between adolescence and adulthood to silence my imagination? I Think I Can't, I Think I Can't. Lack of self-confidence is the biggest barrier to creativity, according to the Center for Studies in Creativity at the State University of New York. We become set in our ways, afraid to change, too old to dream—or so we think. "The way we talk about creativity tends to reinforce the notion that it is some kind of arbitrary gift," echoes John Briggs, author of Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius. "It's amazing the way 'not having it' becomes ...
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