Subtle Foe of Creativity

Creativity flourishes in the worst environments, like a dandelion in poisonThe subtle foe of creativity
Drowns us in banality.
Endless meetings and pointless emails,
Mindless procedures and operations.

A delicate idea that barely exists
Can be crushed with great ease.
Bureaucracy kills all innovation,
Destroys that which might have been.

What ideas have died in utero?
What inventions have never come to be?
Do these stillborn concepts die?
Or do they come back to life?

Sometimes it seems hopeless
To thrive in such a place,
But ideas are like dandelions
Growing in hostile soil.

Against the subtle, seductive forces
Of groupthink and bureaucracy,
Creativity grows and even thrives
If you know how to grow it.

The enemy of art exists to test us.
To make us worthy of the Muse.
Through our struggles and our travails
We can prove our ideas worthy.

And so we fight for our vision,
And we fight for creativity.
The better an idea is,
The harder it has to struggle.

Many ideas don’t survive the fight.
But the ones that do
Will thrive in the wild,
Changing the world around us.

It’s easy to get discouraged by this.
But every day we soldier on.
Because at the end of the day,
That is all we really can do.

Discussion on Creativity

How do you fight against bureaucracy and complacency? If you have any good tips on staying creative, let me know in the comment section.

Steve Lovelace

Steve Lovelace is a writer and graphic artist. After graduating Michigan State University in 2004, he taught Spanish in Samoa before moving to Dallas, Texas. He blogs regularly at http://steve-lovelace.com.

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4 Responses

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