I think we’re all born poets.
We’re all born with the ability to choose curiosity, with the ink of our life’s novel woven into our veins, waiting to be bled into words.
But creativity is a choice to make. Whether it’s a realistic or metaphorical take on the word, it tints the lens that the world is seen from—a choice between rose-colored glasses or somber, ashen ones.
Some people are raised in a logical world where their lives are planned by the book, and the calendar never fails to be checked in red. They dream in a futuristic sense and are aware of the heavy loads from their past, but they never let it pull them behind because they believe the simple fact that it can’t be changed. Days are scheduled, and, as a result, sleep comes easy by sundown. They count their time in weeks and days.
However, putting a stable numerical value on the moments spent grounded on Earth is no way to judge the weight and significance of a lifetime.
But, logical individuals still have poetic practices. They may not sit and observe the way the labyrinth of clouds methodically adjusts during a scorching sunset, but they have an impressive way with words when faced with their goals and hopes for what is to come. Their poetic style of speaking about realistic challenges—career paths, grades, job opportunities—makes them all deserving of being labeled as creative; their approach is simply more direct.
Others, with the not-so-logical, scattered outlook, take on a bit of a different perspective. Their personal story has notes in the margins, small entries in various shades of ink, and is filled with pages of illegible handwriting.
The beauty, the poetry, is in the mess. It can be read in shrill excitement, and it can be read through tears, but the importance of a paragraph that may be overlooked at first always proves to be significant, even if it is a few chapters later.
The stories that society sometimes overlooks happen to be the most creative of them all. When putting aside the logical thinkers and the more intricate perspectives, children are the ones who never lose their sense of character.
As a child, the world is only what is in eyesight. They don’t get the sense of being infinitesimally small on the grand scale of life. Their creativity is learned in the time spent making a new path in nature or being engrossed in the realms of various paper societies. Passion is taught in the belief that a future can be built off of whatever dream is pursued.
The problem is that a figurative, literary attitude can be ignored. Untaught.
Growing up around a set of rational minds and straightforward perspectives, I thought that the flicker of originality dampened as an adult. But as I’ve gotten older, my heart, the home of my poetic temperament, has become softer than ever before, and now I have hope that it never hardens.
