The covid-19 pandemic shut down the country for several months and we are just starting to reopen. Most organizations and businesses are looking for guidance on what to do and they are frustrated at the lack of direction. But some are not waiting, they are “thinking outside the box,” they are “reinventing their businesses,” and they are “making do with what they have.”
These are the creative folks; they will always survive; they will always thrive; they will always succeed.
How then can we foster creativity in everybody? How do we encourage, nurture and grow creativity? I believe that, in great part, the seeds of creativity reside in the arts. Unfortunately, in our education system, we seem to separate the arts from other disciplines that we deem more important.
We focus on science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) when we should add the A of Art and make it STEAM. If you ask why, Albert Einstein had the best answer when he said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge because knowledge is finite but imagination is infinite.” He knew what he was talking about.
The arts feed the imagination and foster creativity. A book or a movie will ask us to suspend disbelief and will construct a whole story based on a premise you must accept on faith.
Similarly, Euclid constructed planar geometry based on a couple of axioms that had no proof. And if you change one of the axioms, you can construct a completely different geometry. The power of imagination.
There is little doubt that Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are as much artists as they are technologists. But “So what? Who cares?” you ask. We all should care because stimulating creativity by integrating arts and science is the only way we can overcome the tendency of technology to make us obsolete.
Robots are taking our jobs, computers have access to all existing knowledge, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing quickly to use this knowledge appropriately. What are we to do? Well, like when we face any crisis, we must “think outside the box” we must “reinvent the future” we must be “creative.”
So, when you hear that budgets are tight, that there is no money for the arts and that we must concentrate on science and engineering, resist with all your might.
Support and encourage the arts, after all, our future depends on it!
Dan Abenaim,
Lynnfield
Dan Abenaim has been an engineer for 55 years with several dozen patents. He credits his lifelong passion for the arts for his inventiveness and creativity. He is an active member of the Lynnfield Art Guild and helped create the Guild’s current virtual art show on its website.
