We need to think about creativity

and how it might be achieved. 
In the middle of all the horrific news of this last week - there was also yet another massacre of Christians in Nigeria that doesn't seem to have made any news headlines at all - I was trying to get some work done.
I am hoping to spend four days helping a friend at a craft fair in this coming week. It is something I have done several times before and it is a "holiday" of sorts for me because it is so totally different from what I usually do. 
My usual working life has more to do with destruction than creation. I don't destroy things. The people I work with don't destroy things. They are the people who are out there trying to rebuild after nature or humans or both have done their worst. 
The people I work with have a variety of hobbies - at least those I know something about. They often don't have a lot of time for such things but, when they do, their hobbies are often of the "make something" variety. There have even been occasional requests such as "Cat, this has nothing to do with work but you can knit can't you? I can't work this out."
They are following a pattern and that's fine because they are still creating something. What is more they are wrong when they say it has nothing to do with work. It has everything to do with work. They need that act of creating something positive. I need it too.
It will, as always, be interesting to help other people in their quest to create something when I see them at the craft fair.
But, I'll be going along with something to create too. At quieter moments my friend and I will both be working on something. We approach the creative process from slightly different directions. Rather than use patterns written by others we make our own. We write patterns for other people to use and, within that, we both encourage other people to be creative.
The first time I spent four full days helping my friend she wasn't even there.  She was away teaching on the other side of the world. I was more than a little uncertain about helping. I am no salesperson. A mutual friend was responsible for the stand. She is another lovely and creative person. At the end of the last day though we had run out of yarn packs for rug kits. I found myself on the floor, surrounded by balls of yarn, helping someone put together the colours for a kit we were making up for her. I hadn't thought about this again until I was stopped in the shopping centre this last week.
    "You won't remember me but you helped me put the yarn together for a rug ages ago now."
She jogged my memory.
    "Did you finish it?"
    "Oh yes. It - well "saved my life" would be an exaggeration but it helped a lot to have that on hand because I was going through a really rough time at work. It took me about a year to finish it. I've made a few things since then but I might see if I can get there over the weekend and get something else nice. It just feels so good to do something like that."
Good.
Yesterday I went to a meeting of our knitting guild. I had to go because I had promised those who had attended my workshop earlier in the month that I would be there to help if they needed it.
All but one of them had tried to finish their "homework". One had done it on very fine needles and the result was exquisite. I looked around the room. People were working on projects. They were following patterns. It doesn't matter. They were creating things. 
We need more of that. We need to teach children to create. We want more young adults who, instead of going to the climate rally on Friday, are going off to plant trees today. It is their gesture towards climate change - and one they plan to continue. They want to help re-create a forest. 
Perhaps if we stopped concentrating so much on the negatives we could find more time to be creative. It's time to start thinking about that.