with apologies and thanks to Adam Savage
After drilling another hole in his chair, he stopped and asked himself “why?” It was at once the most important and the most insignificant question to ask. The answer is old as time, young as baby laughter, broad as the universe, and constrained as a grain of sand: because it needed to exist. For the man drilling holes, it was a culmination, of sorts, of a life journey. It was aesthetically pleasing, artistically fulfilling, manually rewarding and many, many other things all at once. It was this man’s point of view on what that chair should be made extant in the world.
Often what the rest of the world may call “creativity”, this man, Adam Savage, calls “point of view”. Creativity is contradictorily too small and too broad. Too inexact and too confining. Traditionally meaning a spark that makes something, or as Webster might say, “the ability to bring into existence” what is currently meant by creativity is better summed up in what Savage says is point of view: taking the sum of you and putting it into something because it needs to exist.
Poetry, love, dress-making, cooking, coding, carpentry, masonry, singing – the list extends as far as human nature itself – all are valid ways to express one’s point of view. That is the distillation of the why. I paint using black pigment because, for me, something needs to exist blackly. This isn’t about right or wrong, or correct or incorrect. This is about need. Mozart wrote his music because he needed that music to exist in the world. Ditto every creative act that has burst out of someone into existence: that person needed that thing to exist.
Otherwise, “creating” would be a pointless endeavor, better left abandoned to the Void. Feeding, clothing, sheltering, and surviving take enough time, energy, and thought as it is, why take that valuable temporal resource and squander it drilling holes in a chair?
Maslow, the psychologist, posited a hierarchy of needs. First is survival, last is self-actualization. Can’t have the last without the first being served, and everything else in between. While true enough on a basic level, on the quantum aspect it isn’t quite so clear cut. Yes, if you are starving, you do everything you can for food. But a starving artist will still exercise their point of view to splash color on a canvas to sell in exchange for the currency necessary to purchase bread.
How is this need manifested? For most, it is unconscious and automatic. For some it is yanked down out of the aether, for others it hits in a flash of genius, and yet it happens every single day. How much salt do you sprinkle in the frying pan? Which note follows the one just written? Which word is most fitting? How much pressure does that brick need when pressed into the mortar? All of that, and more, is part of the point of view people express every day in the mundane and the magical. An engineer uses her point of view to curve a windscreen for a new vehicle design. A mother uses point of view to soothe an upset baby. A father uses point of view to guide a child into adulthood. Yes, an artist uses their point of view to craft their art: a clay vessel, a musical opus, a novel, or a sculpture. Whether you walk quickly down the street, or saunter across the crosswalk, every decision can be seen as a microcosm of point of view expressed.
The counterpoint in skepticism says that not everything is an art, or is creative, but that is a failure to see the beauty in the humane. It is the blind man missing the sunset in his visual darkness. The sum of every step you make before the next dictates how you place your foot, how you push off the ground, whether you slide, glide, pounce, pirouette, or simply plod along the sidewalk. That could be an unconscious point of view, or for the dancer, conscious as they flutter across a garden. All of humanity is creating, exercising our own point of view, all the time.
Start thinking in terms of point of view and it changes how you see things. No longer is the creative act reserved for a few gifted individuals: now it is something everyone can access and enjoy. Evaluations are, ultimately, insignificant. I can’t write music the way Mozart did, but then, I don’t have his point of view on melody and rhythm and harmony and the aural world. What I can do, that Mozart couldn’t, is write the way I do. He didn’t possess my point of view on the written word. He didn’t craft food like any chef you might name. He didn’t play sports like any athlete. But oh! could he write music! And if you do write music, only the sum of your psyche and experience can create the music you can, that, again, Mozart never could. Mozart never rapped, or scored a film that would make an audience weep. But you can exercise your point of view to make whatever-it-is-you-make.
Adam Savage’s holy chair is full of holes, not quite how he envisioned it at first, but how it needed to be made in the end. Only he could have drilled all the holes, or polished them, or painted them, or sanded them, and crafted them just so. Only a madman would have undertaken the monumental task to take a perfectly serviceable chair and fill it full of holes. Point of view isn’t about that at all. Only a sane man like Adam Savage could take that chair and make it what it is today.
And so you.
Take your point of view and apply it to what you do, and put it into the world. Only you are able. And you need to do it, whether you realize it or not, to be completely you. And the world needs your particular flavor to be the best damn world it can be, hurtling through space and time. You never know whose life you may impact just by being you.
a simple man 