Several times in the last few weeks I’ve found myself arguing the need for a low-brow, mundane, ‘everyday’ impression of creativity. The reason is this: Almost everything people do moment-to-moment involves a degree of freedom in the way these doings are expressed. Most of these doings involve putting actions together through time, toward some purpose, and so involve creating in a very literal sense.
This is true of many things that are apparently repetitive; making coffee, writing emails, walking the dog, driving to work, walking into the office, sitting down at the desk, booting up Zoom, and so forth. Even when the broad strokes appear similar, the minutiae are likely to differ for reasons that are sometimes unconscious (perhaps it might have to do with how we slept the night before), and sometimes a little clearer (perhaps the coffee machine is out of order and we prepare tea instead). The main point is that there is almost always an opportunity for agency in some measure.
This is a much less exciting interpretation than what the word creativity popularly evokes. It positions creativity as a very basic quality of humans’ involvement in the world around them, rather than as a special state enjoyed from time to time by artists and children. Importantly (to my mind at least), an everyday notion of creativity affords an opportunity to reframe things a little. Rather than perceiving creativity as an outcome to be achieved, it can be viewed as a normal process; something to be participated in with a degree of consciousness.