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A scar is not just a mark of pain. It is a symbol of survival, a reminder that we endured and adapted. A scar is a bookmark in our story that allows us to see the writing again, maybe from a new perspective. As we create our stories and write our own histories, the scars we have as reminders can become much more than a bad memory. Creativity is the act of rewriting the scar’s meaning, turning pain into a symbol of resilience. When we deliberately author our own story with the experience as periphery, we can define the moment in our own words and in a light that manifests a positive outcome.
Regardless of how it felt then, with time we can redefine the symbols and reanalyse the events to see how our presence and misfortune was something more than just a nasty incident. Often our scars and tribulations are not unique to us, they’re shared among likeminded and self-similar communities across cultures, generations, and social groups. As we navigate our own story, the framework that others have adapted to for empowerment through trauma and discontent can become prompts for our own sense of progression. These scars remind us that suffering is inevitable, but they also remind us that survival is possible. No matter how good, prepared, or well-loved we are, bad things will happen. Whether on an individual basis or on a community basis, injustice and natural progression alike can cause us to suffer, to lose joy, and to feel unwanted things. During the initial moment of pain, we respond as natural beings. Our feelings, our actions, our decisions are immediate and fleeting. From this moment of vulnerability and weakness, we have a choice to continue and grow or to fall on our knees and give up. This experience shapes who we are as we move forward, it becomes a page in our story, and it carries reasons and causes for all manner of things that come next. How are we going to let these things change the way we progress? Will we cry victim and demand better from them or will we cry evolution and expect better from ourselves? Maybe it’s a bit of both. Like the Japanese art of kintsugi, mending broken pottery with gold, when the world smashes the pots of our spirit, we can use the magic of story and of personal agency to carry them into a positive light. As these stories and progressions grow, as communities learn coping mechanisms and the tools for acceptance in strength, these symbols and stories become enshrined in the community consciousness. Across cultures, artists have long shown us that creativity is not just expression, it is alchemy, turning wounds into wisdom. 
For non-creative types, the mythic inventor or fountain of wisdom might sound romantic and alluring but it’s hardly ever the case. Real creativity isn’t about mysterious forces and divine insight handed down from aliens, angels, or archons. No, it’s the normal workings of the brain when a problem is provided and its solution is something you care about. We imagine the lone genius struck by lightning-bolt inspiration, but in truth most breakthroughs look more like patient gardening than divine revelation. When we see a clever solution to a problem, we can often be amazed at how simple or ingenious, or how magical the process may seem. It all depends on the level of understanding required to appreciate how it works. Yet even the simplest solutions seem to evade us until they’re pointed out. It requires an element of imagination to see things in a new light, and that’s something we all have. So, if we learn what happens in the creative mind, we are in a better place to emulate that and think of solutions for ourselves.
The creative process is the central mechanism in the act of creativity, the person and the product are on either side of this fundamental dynamic. If you care about finding a solution or achieving something that you desire, then you’ll be in good stead to be the creative person. Next, you have you apply what you know to the problem. By learning about what you’re trying to achieve, you populate your mind with relevant and associated wisdom. It's rare to find a solution straight away, often all kinds of things influence you in the beginning and it’s like finding a path through a new forest. As you learn the trees, the lighting, the sounds, things start to become clearer. Often the time comes when you have to take a break. We can’t dedicate ourselves to solving little problems all the time, often we’re left wondering what time it is and realise we’ve a thousand jobs to take care of. When our conscious awareness is no longer focused on the issue at hand, the information we learned becomes processed and gradually taken up into long-term memory. It’s at this stage where our subconscious mind takes over and begins assimilating this wisdom into the context of our problem. Because we can’t see this process directly, if often seems mystical or magical. In fact, it’s normal behaviour. What happens in the mind when we learn information and use it to solve a new problem? We use the information gathered, often in a completely unrelated context, and reframe it using our own perspective. This often provides brand-new insights and offers patterns and statistical behaviours that were so-far unnoticed. By re-arranging what we know about the natural world and the invented world simultaneously, we can use invention and nature together to form new and valuable products or ideas. We learn new wisdom about the world when we look again at data with a new set of eyes and a different angle of understanding. As our control agenda, or the initial problem, fades into passive attention when we go about our normal lives, the interest we discovered in the associated data remains. This encourages us to still research and learn on the concepts even when we may not care so much about our initial desire or idea. As we increase our body of knowledge on the topics, we build an ever-clearer picture of what we are learning about. Eventually, something might click in the mind where all the data begins to point to something we can use, something of value to us. Every generation has had its own problems to solve, and the data collected by the previous generation to work with. As we can only assess creativity by product when it comes to historical activities, like inventing the wheel, the brick wall, the bow and arrow, we can delve a lot more deeply into the creative processes of post-industrial thinkers. Self-reporting has been an integral part of scientific thought, as the process must be repeatable and transparent. However, when self-reporting, inventors and creative people might not be aware of their subconscious processes or little influences and so ascribe everything to strange power, cleverness, or some other non-scientific explanation. Creativity isn’t a lightning strike from the heavens, it’s the slow, attentive weaving of what we know, what we notice, and what we care about. With the right surroundings, the right companions, and the willingness to keep looking again, each of us can create something of value. That value need not be measured in millions; sometimes the most transformative act is simply caring enough to make the world a little better. Explore a universe of professional creativity with Magix Creative Software. Make music, videos, animations, rescue video tapes, and much more. (Ad) 
Thinking about thinking has always served us well. Like a pool reflecting our rippled selves, a good philosophical dialogue clarifies what we see. When we grow up, our ideas and imagination mix with everything we experience, are taught, and hear in stories. Philosophy examines this, our intellect, our culture, our reasons for remembering. It gives us an open door into the realm of idea and motive that, if we enter, can put us in a powerful place when using our own discernment and inventiveness.
As we nourish ourselves on the best food the mind can grow and bring seeds from all over the world to plant in our garden, complementing what we naturally grow, our diet and health will benefit. Mental health is not just a chemical reaction, so often it is about our thoughts. This is why philosophy matters far beyond the classroom. So, philosophy doesn’t just inform science, politics, ethics, and religion, it informs the self, the subconscious, and our friends as to what is really happening. Philosophy helps us to reserve judgement and appreciate the subtle differences in virtue and logic that we independently nurture. Not everything that grows is perfect, roses have thorns. Stinging nettles are full of good vitamins. Blackberry bushes snag and grab you, and apple trees are difficult to climb. Philosophy can be like a huge orchard and flower garden. When we jump in, sometimes there will be something painful, uncomfortable, or simply unpassable that puts us in our place. The entire opus of gathered philosophy is bound to be overgrown, unkempt, and unfriendly in places. This is why we are better off with a guide. A professional guide who knows the garden, who has maps, and who can explain how to reach the fruit and smell the flowers without getting scratched or tangled. Help yourself, in your own time, and at your own pace, to this list of Free Philosophy podcasts and courses online. There’s a brilliant selection. Begin, and you’ll discover not only yourself more clearly, but the world more deeply too. The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps This is a huge compilation and takes us through the whole subject in little, accessible sections. We meet the main luminaries of the subject one by one. The breadth of the globe is considered, and we visit schools of thought from all over the world. This helps to give us deeper insights into the way people think if they come from other cultures. After Dinner Conversation A regular discussion on ethics far and wide, something to delve into and put the mind to work when examining the conscience. How does your moral code match up to the global consensus? The Gray Area In the Gray Area Podcast, regular episodes explore the darker side of ethics and morality. It asks probing questions about modern and ancient practices that examine the virtue or lack of, in various contexts. Royal Institute of Philosophy This website is full of Philosophy Resources. Many of the resources are completely free and they include courses, podcasts, and articles that examine a wide range of philosophical thought. FutureLearn A worldwide education portal that links to several leading colleges and universities, FutureLearn has a healthy selection of Free Philosophy courses for you to enjoy. OverThink For people who don’t always have the time to think deeply, this offers a generous opening into a world of deep thought. A light-hearted tone and a subject matter that’s usually highly accessible, OverThink is a great place to relax. OpenCulture A go to place for cultural knowhow, info, and knickknacks, OpenCulture has a page dedicated Free Philosophy, too. Thier list is in-depth and more centred on topic and teacher rather than the whole. Yale Free Courses Yes, it is ‘that’ Yale, so if you wanted to add that name to your list of accolades, you could do it for only the cost of time. Their philosophy tends to be political and historical rather than spiritual or systemic. It’s the kind of philosophy that helps explain why politicians seem to be so alien at times. 
In a world of subjective experience, where our life stories craft our perceptions of the world, no two people can be the same. Not only are we genetically unique out of billions, but our individual backgrounds are also as varied as the clouds in the sky. This makes for unfathomable variations within our global community. Our cultures can help define who we are, the places we live, the people we live with, and the people we admire all help guide us into our true selves. Our internal framework of virtue, right from wrong, and what is proper, is crafted in stages and branches off into all aspects of our personality. Like a spider’s web, the whole network of ideas and associated feelings vibrates when one line is plucked. This can create problems when discussing or debating complex or emotionally charged ideas.
Dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that happens when two conflicting subjective truths fail to resonate. If someone plays the wrong note in a song, you can hear it immediately. It can ruin the experience for that moment, and if they keep doing it, the entire song can be crucified live on stage. This is because chords and notes in music resonate through harmony. Wrong notes do not resonate with harmony because they don’t fit the pattern. The opposite of resonance, in music, is also called dissonance. It is technically the same principle but in two different arenas. Dissonance doesn’t just happen in music. Perhaps this isn’t a concert. Maybe, this time the wrong note is an idea in a conversation or even a debate. If we are being called on to respond and add to the topic, our emotions can add extra colour to our reaction. These wrong notes or dissonant ideas can become pressure variations in swelling clouds. If they get too intermingled, the natural result might be thunder and lightning. This can also happen in the mind, when one rhetoric and narrative create a dissonance rather than a resonance. Depending on the feelings that surround the exchange, all manner of conflicting issues may arise. If the opinion of the other isn’t so relevant to you, you may regret their personality mismatch and think no more of it. If you love them, or respect them, if their view makes you look like you’re guilty, or some other charged situation with a much larger outcome, you might feel more passionately about asserting your rhetoric and your narrative. This is especially true if your version is concrete and rooted in your own experience, rather than read about or learned second-hand. Sometimes there is no way around the dissonance, and walking away is not a favourable option. This can be for many reasons, emotional or practical. The most difficult dissonance to resolve is the kind that strikes at our sense of right and wrong. Most of our virtues trace back to this principle, with the why and how carried to us through examples and stories we’ve learned. Sometimes our body reacts before our mind catches up. We feel something is wrong, even if we can’t yet name it. Subconsciously, we are responding to a deeper sense of wisdom. This can be an incredibly powerful motivator, and when it aligns with clear thoughts we can describe and defend, it’s like a river breaking free from a dam. When the perspective before us feels alien, or counter to what we know, and we care deeply about our truth and those who need to hear it, emotions can rise to critical levels. We can become desperate, even panicked, and as we see in our streets and across social media, people get angry. A radically different perspective can feel like an assault on the core of who we are. If our virtues are not respected or even recognised because of a conflicting narrative, it can feel undermining, disrespectful, a direct scratch on our self‑esteem. It is no crime to have a fragile self‑esteem. But such moments can make us feel slighted and almost entitled to respond with equal force or with something twice as fierce, to ensure the wound is not struck again. What if the situation isn’t about you and another person, but about a community, a country, or a wider issue dominating the social conversation? What if it’s not just you who feels the dissonance, but a large group like a demographic, or a coalition of people sharing the same view across the broader landscape? This is when dissonance can spread into public rage: difficult to control, hard to resolve peacefully, and often leading to a loss of trust and a widening gap in the scales of justice. It manifests in posters, songs, newspaper articles, and graffiti, culminating in a social musical score with aligned notes and orchestrations of rhetoric that harmonise with brewing grievances. If left to grow, and the passion is ignored, protests may break out. Emotional calls to action can escalate, sometimes tipping into harmful riots and clashes between well‑meaning citizens caught in something beyond their control, and the authorities tasked with restoring order. Anger is a natural response, and when we use nature to our benefit, we can become empowered by what it has to offer. How can we use something as hot and dangerous as anger to our benefit? It boils down to focus, containment, and deliberate action. Focus means the anger must be kept clean — not a far‑reaching explosion that disrupts whatever happens to be in the way, not a public outburst designed to create a scene, but a clear knowing of what you want to change and why. Containment means the anger is not allowed to leak into other areas; your passion and drive are not excuses to sour your mood, lash out, or treat others with unearned hostility. Containment reinforces focus, ensuring your moral energy stays in check and you keep the high ground. Deliberate action is the end result of this discipline. The heat of your anger can be like the fires in a forge. Imagine molten steel pouring from your furnace, ready to build the bridge you need to meet others halfway. You can use the energy of outrage to create something that paves a road forward, allowing you to walk away without losing your peace. You might even forge a new system that makes space for both perspectives to thrive side by side. The vast tapestry of life will always offer up unpractised musicians and clumsy masons. Variation is the natural world’s great gift, the force that allows life to evolve, transcend its prototype, and become something more. When we take a positive approach to our dissonance, and feed the fires of productivity, creativity, and invention, our journey shifts from destructive to future‑building. The best way to shape the future is to create it yourself. We cannot do everything, but the small universe beneath our feet is ours to tend. So, take it, build your mosaics from right and wrong, tested virtues, and the truths you hold dear. Be the builder, the inventor, the one who forges a path through anger and dissonance until two opposing ideas can stand together on common ground, sharing the same horizon. Do you want to gain a deeper understanding of human behaviour, emotion, and how to best manage these thing with yourself and others? Take some power back with this selection of top courses with free access. 
If you have a passion for the arts and for creativity, then you’ll likely know how difficult it can be to find your voice and your own inner light. So often we begin because we’re inspired by someone or influenced by something, and this initial experience can frame everything we contribute. From these early days which are half for fun and half completely serious, we choose our path and build on the things we know. On one hand, this comes to us for free, the creative energy and the mental frameworks for inventiveness flow like water. The desire is there and it’s within reach. But there is also a cost. A creative path can be a long series of trials that balance out the reward. When we mean business and want to take ourselves seriously as adults with a genuine place in the world, making our creative side compatible with the world so our story makes sense requires a lot of deep inner work as well as personal training.
The most obvious thing we all have to go through is the process of getting extremely good at your skills. When we enter the marketplace, our skills must reach a threshold that far exceeds the average. We are expected to be in the top 5 or 10% to even consider ourselves something as a professional. I once played football with a lower league reserve player. You’d be forgiven for thinking that at that level, the difference wouldn’t be too much. You’d be wrong. Their football skills were far better than anything I’d ever experienced. To become this good, there must be a lengthy process of practice and learning. Imagine you’ve been great at something for years and your reputation is well known, in general circles. Now you must be a beginner again. Being open to this kind of training, when you already sum yourself up as pretty good, takes a dose of humility and an acceptance that good doesn’t mean brilliant. Getting over yourself and building your skills to a level that surpass the norm, without being complacent, means some deep inner work for most of us. This costs us in not only time but in emotional security, temporarily. Once the process is well under way and you can begin the work of a creative person, you will start to explore the inner world of intangible experience and bring it into the outer world through colour, sound, shape, aroma, taste, texture, and any other form of sense experience. Reflecting the inner world that’s often complex and independent from our external social structures means we need to filter all the elements we find tied in that we decide are not what we want to express. Manifesting the inner world of our imagination and our desire to spread messages means we will experience both shadow and light as we discover what lays within our own psyche. When we work in good conscience and a sense of responsibility, working through this and unpicking the golden thread from the rotten is humbling work. This is us we are exploring and our own flaws and biases we are ironing out. A lot of people find this incredibly difficult. A lot of common pitfalls in the arts are emotional. Being great at a skill to a level that’s rare and unique, like painting or writing, baking, or building, can mean we become so confident that we assume everyone respects us, likes us, and wants our honest opinion. We can forget that our words and actions have real implications in other people’s lives. Confidence can turn to arrogance which can express as narcissism. Soon, we’re throwing hurtful words around and walking around where we’re not invited, completely oblivious to the harm and distress we’re causing. I think we’ve all met people like that and at some point, as children we probably went through this phase, too. We’re great, aren’t we? Everyone loves me. My emotional and judgemental responses are part of that thing people love. It’s not true. Even if you’re brilliant at something or a lot of things, your personality is still something you control and should be brilliant at too. It’s great to respect yourself for what you’ve achieved and learned, remember that other people just get the face and trousers. The story is yours. When we have strong feelings about ourselves or others, either good or bad, these can put down motorways of reference that we can’t help but drive down. Ultimately, strong emotions can limit what we create, how we think, and what can be done with what we have. As well as delivering a sense of passion and drive that we require to be effective, when the sensation is negative and the thoughts hurtful to self or someone else, our ability to positively affect the world with our skills is drastically reduced. Cortisol and adrenaline just get in the way of our free-flowing idea machine when they have a miserable backdrop. This means that we end up having to do a lot of inner work to unroot all the negative and hurtful, creativity killing reactions that go on in our mind and biochemistry. It’s not like we can afford a therapist every time, so most of us just make do with the Copilot or some YouTube self-help channel. On the flipped side of this emotional pitfall is the effect of it happening to others by proxy. If you are particularly good at something, being connected to you can be a source of self-congratulation and personal one-upping that can make people behave differently around you. Relationships can be strained when your perceived aura causes others to act out of character to meet you at where they perceive you. All the while, you’re where you always have been, waiting to be seen for who you really are. This, too, can be difficult to handle and means we have a lot of inner work to do so we can meet this new challenge of having aloof or waspish people around you who think they’re doing the right thing. A calm insistence on the truth without an argumentative tone is the only real way to deal with the self and others, when personal biases and assumptions begin to take the lead. The world is full of biases that we’ve been exposed to since we were small. A creative life is not immune from this. In fact, it is seriously affected by the general social image that the arts occupy in the civic imagination. The value of a thing and the worth of a thing are typically rated by revenue. For an artist, the worth and value are often rated by response, effect, and inspiration. This gives a sense that artists are wealthy or from a class that has ready money. Most of the arts do not pay well enough to make a living and they require becoming compatible with the side of the world that has money to hand. Prejudices and biases can be a real problem when communicating your passion and occupation, being fast to assume vanity, or not very good, or never going to make it, can become huge obstructions to progress. It can also be hurtful as statements like that imply deep personal flaws or inadequacy. Rather than exclaiming how dare you, which is what some might want to, just smile and move on. It’s not your job to wake every sleeping princess and every frog prince. To combat the general impression that the arts are a waste of time and for people with lots of money, it’s important that you work hard to make your art pay as much as it can. That is if you want to do it as an occupation. Show that it’s a real way of life that works for you and lots of other people, too. It’s easy to say, difficult to do. Getting hard value from our arts is no easy task. Many an artist have gone mad or given up entirely because their lifetime of sacrifice and effort remains unrewarded on the outside. Ascribing our value according to the perceptions of others is only natural and to work through this, again takes a lot of inner work. Having the stomach to accept your reality of having little to show for mountains of work and effort without complaining is how we find the strength to build on our skills and rediscover our inventiveness. The ghosts of self-loathing and self-doubt can haunt us even in the daytime as complaints and accusations build up against a backdrop of silence and being passed by. Finding the inner strength to be solid and to have enough assertiveness with your emotions to dismiss those thoughts as unhelpful is a necessary lesson and if you’ve not done it before, takes a lot of practice. Creative people express a level of neurodiversity that means others often misunderstand or judge them for behaving or thinking in novel or unusual ways. Harmless differences are normal however with creative people, their capacity to be inventive means that differences might manifest more often. This can cause social issues in that others are not sure how to respond. Non-creative people or people who rely on set piece social dynamics will struggle to interact because they don’t want to misunderstand or be misunderstood. The opposite can also happen where we draw attention to ourselves as different and therefore a target for personal attack. Some people get a reward for hurting others and creative people often must be able to handle this more than usual. As our identity and our occupation blur at the edges, an artist can find this even more challenging. The act of delivering aspects of yourself and your imagination to the world as a daily routine means the difference between your life and your work can become hard to distinguish. Putting down a boundary is vital however the passion and drive doesn’t disappear just because you’ve changed the scenario. Thinking about and sometimes worrying about the work side of things is a constant issue that requires mental discipline to establish firm borders. The other aspect of having life, self, and work aligned in such a way is that any rejections we receive have the deep hurt related to personal rejection. It’s a part of our character that is being turned down, and when the people turning it down are close to you then it can be quite painful. There needs to be an inner process of learning to take rejection and accept being turned down by people you respect and like without being personally affected. This is why the boundary between work and life is so important. The narrative that focuses on your occupation and your rewarding work needs to take a back seat otherwise it risks being contradicted regularly. Save it for when you need a boost. Being true to yourself and expressing genuine inner realities into some kind of creative output and process means accepting the journey. It is humbling at first, as we uncover the gloomy aspects of ourselves and the limitations of our skills. What we find and what we lack are the things that define our work and it’s on both sides of our awareness. Getting our ideas to a point that becomes accessible and compatible with the world at large takes a real effort to work through improvements inside and out. We end up losing elements of ourselves to the process of growing up and learning new psychological mechanisms that bring out the side of us we need and rely on. Becoming the artist who can be independent and fully immersed in their trade means letting go of some of our more childish and imaginary aspects in favour of the hard, cold, and realistic. Creative people have vivid imaginations and often find themselves swamped in narrative that can’t be applied to the real world and original work. We might have uniforms or costumes, stage names, and manufactured personas, but when we express our creative skill in the world, we are exposing a part of ourselves that makes us vulnerable and open. To truly serve by bringing out our own inner truths and perspectives, our unique creative ideas, the pathway from mind to the world must be clear. By putting up blocks and twists and turns the thoughts get caught up, mistranslated, and contaminated with whatever else is going on. Through the medium of your art, the reality of your inner world is brought into the outer world by keeping the doorway clear. Finding this skill means learning to straighten the mind and quieten the thoughts so that the outward expression is given the space to thrive. It is hard and as we examine the narrative we allow, it often becomes clear that it’s biased and full of emotive inconsistency. Cutting it out is how we purify our creativity and make it as effective as possible. As you discover the kinds of things that present in your own thinking that do not align with your conscience and the ideal you want to reach for, others will mirror their own shadows in the face of your light. As a creative person, your new and interesting ideas are like reg flags to some people who insist on conformity and sameness. They can be haughty and judgemental, hurtful and demeaning, when you attempt to deviate from the norm in even the smallest way. Finding it in yourself to be confident and secure even when people who you may respect undermine your foundations, the confidence in your direction must be deeper than their shovels. Appreciating that people can be wrong about you and have their own defence mechanisms when made uncomfortable, it becomes easier to understand when you feel personally slighted by words. It is your responsibility to accept the truth about who you are and what your passions are. As we delve into our own inner world, there will be thoughts and feelings that come forward that do not represent who we are, hurts and traumas, funny biases, cruel ones, things that keep us safe from looking at ourselves in painful ways, and these all come apart like the skin of an onion. The soul of the individual is different, you owe it to yourself to complete who you are by working on your attributes, being honest about your passion and talents, and working to serve the world with what you’re given. This service mentality helps us to stay grounded when we hit rock bottom and the heights of success. We lose some of the pleasure of creating, the childish fun no longer serves us. The playful element gets in the way. Creating for the real world means we make real world experience that not only appeals to others but offers us a sense of artistic reward. As we build our character to become the people we need to be to make a success of it, we lose parts of ourselves that no longer serve us and that stand in the way of our progress. Other people might identify these parts of us with who we really are and they may not like the new version of us. We need to remember that this is for us and our family, not for people who like the younger version of you. Fancy a drink? Get great quality wines delivered to your door risk free. Browse the sale section first? You support this journal with any purchase. |
CategoriesAuthorAlternative Fruit by Rowan B. Colver 
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January 2026
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