In my personal creative experiences, being creative meant surviving and vice versa. It meant going beyond the confines of creative ideas that have already been juggled or developed, and it initially meant cautiously considering unspoken stipulations to choose between feeling that permission and approval must be sought before deciding how to create something, or just having the audacity to do what’s needed. Creativity may be described as having its hands in fun pursuits, or feeling fulfilled, or standing on the pinnacle of a highly advanced and accomplished idea, but for a great deal of my own life’s time, creativity was plainly about having to be resourceful.

Practicing and applying the old adage “necessity is the mother of invention” became a rather regular occurrence. Later on in life however, it caused me to speculate whether unlimited creativity was really playing an active role in my determination to create ways into and out of my many limited circumstances. Creativity is, and had been a resourceful tool for getting out of tight spots, and it undoubtedly had a place in the lives of artists looking to produce their next masterpiece, but my senses told me that there had to be so much more to it than just that.

I knew that nailing it down concisely was never going to be part of my intent, especially because I’ve stood by the belief that creativity is the very essence of infinite knowledge. But I was to learn early on in life that audacity was to become the perfect partner in creativity, even more so than Bonnie and Clyde are perfect partners in crime. For example, when I was 12 years old I qualified to join a varsity basketball team. Initially, I was never put on the court because the money to purchase the standard uniform shorts was out of my reach and beyond my control. So, I tore apart pieces of some of the few clothes I’d possessed and sewed together a patch-up job that decently replicated the team bloomers. It helped that team members proudly applauded my “creation” and my little audacious endeavor put me on the court for every game thereafter. From a seamstress’s point of view, I had zero business whatsoever handling a needle and thread, but I did it anyway. What’s more, I boldly tackled a clothes-altering job at a local dry-cleaners for the next four years to pay tuition for the high school I chose to attend.

I continually discovered that in a world of assets, credentials, amenities, social status and all kinds of other associations, there is a sort of unwritten convention that unless you have permission as well as the correct tools or proper approval, then participating in certain circles and activities, or trying to share creative ideas with others that you are knowledgeably unworthy of sharing will be met with signals and snares of disapproval.

But all that had little effect on me. By the age of 13, I’d been smitten with audacious creativity. In the background it was a Cinderella life for me – I dared to imagine while I
sewed because foster home life offered abuse and a joyless atmosphere. School was my refuge and creativity was my companion. Every other task during that time in life was controlled by a head lady with an iron fist, it was only the audacity to be creative that helped me through that time, and even now, helps me to look upon the past with laughter, instead of tears of regret or misfortune.

Creativity does however require some basis of knowledge. Knowledge has a transferable flow with polarizing effects – it can be compared to an electrical current.
Electricity has a negative charge and a positive charge – or an anode and a cathode. Both are equally necessary and have equal values in the production of electricity. In knowledge processing, it is also, both the negative and positive, that must be included to create optimal knowledge possibilities. Applying only one of these values, or believing that one is entirely good and the other entirely bad, defeats the purpose and flow of both knowledge and electricity.

Conversations with others have overwhelmingly led to misunderstandings about this binary relationship between positive and negative. In nearly every verbal exchange, others assumed that I’d proposed that the ‘negative be turned into a positive’, or that I naïvely presumed that optimism meant only positive goodness, even at the risk of projecting false contentment. I’ve explained that such notions would be as silly as expecting to produce electricity with two positive charges. The last time I checked with an electrician I was positively informed that such a recipe for electricity was a completely negative possibility. Within these conversations, I may take the opportunity to elaborate that two negatives might make a positive in the English language, or that almost any culture endorses the idea that two negative behavior responses fail to produce a positive outcome. However, I always reaffirm that in cognitive processing, the negative is just as good as the positive and that the negative aspect of knowledge contains equally valuable optimal charges of applicable information that ought to never be dismissed, omitted or eliminated.

As an adult, the impulse to be creative and recreate knowledge compelled me to redefine everything, with audacity as the driving force – because if I had to seek permission or approval from the proper channels, there would be little to define myself by. Creativity has been a staple mainstay. For instance, I have zero standing or credibility in the fields of Cosmology or Physics, but when I suggested the idea in the comments section of an online publication that “dark matter” would be better defined as “constant matter” – based on what little information Physicists do know about this mysterious form of energy – it had zero traction in the halls of science.

However, I did receive many favorable replies from the lay sector of science aficionados who agreed with my suggested title. It was an audacious suggestion, of course, but I was hardly apt to just sack and denounce my own creative critical thinking skills. What might it be worth to others to debunk the unwritten notion that approval must be granted from the correct channels or fields of knowledge? It seemed more than reasonable to assume conclusions that are based on tenets provided by the very fields that are appointed to handle such knowledge. Creativity requires audacity even at the risk of challenging the kingdom halls of scholarly establishments. It means confronting what we’ve been prone to just accept without question. It’s the field of science, in particular, that dares us to question everything but then questions our  veracity and attempts to pose critical questions.

In another audaciously, even arrogant move, there was a paper I presented at an “open general public session” to some of the world’s leading neuro-technicians who’ve been appointed to create elaborate equipment for scanning and monitoring 100% of the neuronal activity of a “normal adult human brain”. I detailed an explanation suggesting that they simultaneously come up with a way to actually develop 100% of the human brain’s potential, otherwise all that’s really going to take place is a recording of 100% of the limited human brain potential we’ve tapped into thus far in the evolutionary process of progressing human cognition. I’d specifically pointed out that unless these two efforts were converged into a confluent goal, it would only be yielding a sort of false positive. I was met with stunned looks and zero scientific rebuffs.

Making it a practice to create unlimited knowledge possibilities is a necessary element in the process of making choices and decisions. It’s a skill we need on a daily basis as critical thinking adults. It means that uninhibited knowledge accessibility must be a natural born right for everyone, that is, if everyone is to become capable of making fully informed decisions. Anyone can attest to being non-creative, but we can never escape the human condition of having to make decisions, and complex decisions often require creative critical thinking. We must each believe that we can give ourselves permission to engage and push through the barriers of our already explored scales of creativity, which is the same as dismissing the belief that only certain people are endowed with the capacity to create new knowledge theories.

Human creativity and our ability to seek knowledge are elements that are as tied together as time and space. Surely Einstein knew this, and he had to have been audaciously creative in his own right – after all, he was just a patent clerk. He had to have known that creative thinking was daring to think as nobody had done before – with or without qualification. We all have this creative potential within us. Undoubtedly, it must be encoded in our cognitive abilities, which is why I audaciously dared to recreate the definition of “cognition”.

Indeed, it would seem overdue. The conventional definition has remained unchanged
for over 90 years. With all the cognitive discoveries that Neuroscience has been able to uncover in the last few years, as well as having debunked many old world concepts about some of the most basic traits of human potential – such as that sports are all brawn and zero brains, but that it is in fact both – it seems like a ripened time to alter the antiquated definition of cognition. And so, without permission or renown, and borrowing a few strands of information from Neuroscience about the human brain’s fundamental essentials for development, I boldly dismiss the old definition of “cognition”, which is, the ability to acquire knowledge via our senses. In its place, I’ve dared to recreate and considerate it as, the emotional ability to acquire and apply knowledge via our multi- dimensional senses, in conjunction with, the ability to use our sensory tools to create and intuit additional forms of knowledge from the fundamental forms of natural knowledge.

Creative development is probably the best medium and representative for every type
of emotion we can conjure and experience, particularly for a species that thrives and
survives on constantly acquiring and applying knowledge, which is contingent upon an emotionally developed brain that has evolved with a “neuroplastic” propensity for
creativity. We are destined, to be engaged with the entwined elements of emotions,
creative critical thinking, relationships and decision-making on a daily basis – these are the things we each ought to audaciously strive for, regardless of our stations in life.