Let’s pay attention to nothing….

Children are so very good at two things we tend to lose as adults: paying attention and not minding too much if they get things wrong.

A child can spend ten minutes watching an ant cross a path carrying a leaf, they can build an entire kingdom under a table, or attempt something with absolutely no evidence that they’ll be any good at it. Adults, meanwhile, become rather accomplished at knowing what is sensible, useful and, perhaps most limiting of all, what we’re good at. Children know instinctively that a stick might be a sword, a bridge or the beginning of something nobody has thought of yet. Somewhere along the way, however, we learn to ask whether it is useful, whether we’re doing it properly and whether anyone else will approve.

Isaac Newton, one of history’s great minds, spent years pursuing ideas that led nowhere. He experimented with alchemy, became convinced that ancient texts contained hidden codes and subjected himself to some decidedly questionable experiments in the name of understanding light and vision. He was spectacularly wrong about quite a lot.

But he kept looking.

So perhaps creativity needs a little of that same stubborn curiosity: the willingness to follow something simply because it interests us, to create things that don’t quite work, to risk looking foolish and then have another go.

Maybe growing older doesn’t have to mean growing out of wonder. Maybe we need to become a little less afraid of getting it wrong, and just a little more interested in seeing what happens next.