Pathways

Have you ever thought about your everyday life and the most everyday moments as a creative accomplishment? As something involving creative action? Think for a moment about those most mundane, typical days: A rainy Monday on your way to work or shopping in the supermarket or on the Internet—do these days require any creativity? Or what about those more spectacular days, those days standing out more clearly, such as when you decided to move, asked your partner to marry you, or when your first child was born? While I’m not able to test your answers, my guess would be that you would not immediately see the typical supermarket experience or the morning walk in the park with the dog as a creative one. Most often, we pay more attention to the spectacular and the extraordinary. We remember these extraordinary days more clearly than the routines and the habits of everyday life, such as eating breakfast or falling asleep. The exception to this would be when we travel to foreign places and eat different kinds of breakfast, at a different time, or fall asleep in hotel rooms with strange pillows that require ‘improvisation’ to become comfortable. However, the premise of this chapter is that everyday life, also in its mundane and habitual aspects, should become the focus of creativity research if we want to move this field of inquiry steps ahead and, not least, to broaden its focus.