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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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The Problem with Problems |
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Life and creativity are fundamentally about problem-solving. Strip away everything else and that's what remains: identifying what isn't working and figuring out what might. But we've developed a strange relationship with problems. We treat them as interruptions to life rather than the substance of it. We avoid them, deny them, delegate them away. Anything but face them directly. A problem is simply the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Between what exists and what could exist. The canvas is blank, you want it filled. The exhibition needs funding, you don't have it. Your vision exists only in your head, you want it in the world. Problems aren't obstacles to creativity. They're the raw material of it. Yet we've loaded the word "problem" with so much negativity that we've forgotten its neutrality. A problem isn't a punishment or a failure. It's information. It tells you where attention is needed, where change wants to happen, where growth is trying to occur. We avoid problems because solving them requires admitting they exist. And admission feels like failure. If I acknowledge this isn't working, I'm acknowledging I haven't figured it out yet. If I admit I don't know how to proceed, I'm admitting I'm not as capable as I'd like to believe. So we stay busy with lesser concerns, convince ourselves it's not really a problem, wait for circumstances to change. But problems don't disappear through neglect. They compound. Fixing addresses symptoms. Solving addresses causes. You can fix a creative block by forcing yourself to work through it. You solve it by understanding why you're resisting. Most of what we call problem-solving is actually problem-fixing, addressing the urgent instead of the important. The creative life isn't about eliminating problems, it's about engaging better ones. Trading small problems for significant ones. Moving from "What's wrong?" to "What's possible?" The problems you're willing to solve determine everything you'll create. |
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