I realized last week that there are four main qualities I appreciate in people. I love everybody, of course — but for me to like somebody, they have to have at least one of these four things going for them in significant enough quantities for me to notice: Creativity, intelligence, a general chilled-outness, and humility. Since this is positive week, we’re going to focus on what I like about these particular traits and the people who exhibit them.
We’re going to tackle creativity first, which is admittedly a very broad category. I just love creativity in all its forms — from movies to music to novels to touchdown passes to witty one-liners to anything else that involves the use of one’s brain and available resources to make something out of nothing. Some people are more adept than others at looking at a blank page or a developing problem and turning it into a piece of art, or a solution, or both. I like those people. Being around them makes me happy, because you never can tell what they’re going to say or do next. It makes life fun.
(I’m resisting the urge right now to overanalyze myself or my preferences w/r/t the kind of people I like, solely because I’m being completely positive here. Even this parenthetical caveat seems like cheating, but I would put the caveat on this caveat that it could have been a lot less positive than it ended up being. For example, I could have used the phrase “creativity snob.”)
I also appreciate the creative side of myself so much it’s fascinating to see it at work in other people. In my case, the blank piece of paper (or, more accurately, blank screen) is both the scariest and most exciting thing in the world, because of the infinite possibilities it represents. It could literally become anything, and I am in charge of molding it into shape as best I can. I guess scary isn’t the right word — it’s a combination of daunting and sacred that makes me a little scared. I know I’m not the only one who has felt this while staring at a blank computer screen. That’s why I’m always amazed and a little grateful when anyone creates anything of value. They have climbed a sort of mountain, and shared the end result with me. I don’t do any of the work, but I get to reap the rewards of experiencing it anyway.
What’s fascinates me is everything about the creative process, from start to finish. I love hearing the ambitions and visions people have, for everything from writing novels to starting their own businesses.
These visions are what make life worth living. When you really think about it, creating things is the only thing we do that outlives us. I’m talking creation in the broadest sense — including the literal (children, prose) and figurative (love, glad tidings, memories). We’re creating without even trying, and our creations largely define us in the eyes of others.
Need I even mention that God created us, and is obviously the source of all this creation? I’ll just say that it’s obvious, and leave it at that.
You know how I know I intentionally hang around creative people? Because in high school, we made up our own role-playing games. Seriously. We were that nerdy. It was amazing amounts of fun, though, which was why we did it. Someone would come up with a game concept and plan out what would happen when, and we all played our characters and literally did whatever we wanted in the context of the game. If you’re wondering how I can manage to tell a (semi-)coherent story off the top of my head, these games were a large part of my training. We were creating an interactive narrative together, before anyone had heard of such a thing (outside of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, I mean). I still want to write a novel that tells one of those interactive stories, because I remember them as being awesome. And I’m getting out of here on a high.
