Others may be motivated by such things as the thirst for wisdom, the pursuit of creature comforts, altruism, or a craving for adventure. Me? What floods my being with happiness is letting my imagination run wild.
The minute that the busyness of everyday life keeps me too occupied to simply luxuriate in fantasy and creative play, I feel my soul shriveling. When I do get to enjoy my favorite state of dreaminess, my inner happiness unfurls, expands and explodes. If you must know, it really doesn’t take much to make me happy.
Art-Colored Glasses 
I’ve always used the word creative in the way you did here, but in From Dawn to Decadence Jacques Barzun decries that usage, claiming that the word was once much stronger and originally applied only to something truly new (like the monster that Dr. Frankenstein created, for example). Oh well, it’s not often—if ever—that I can lay claim to something innovative, as opposed to merely competent or occasionally even highly competent.
Even by my lights, in recent years I’ve noticed a weakening in the sense of creative, and there are plenty of people now in quest not just for a solution to a problem—or issue, as they insist on calling a problem—but always a “creative” solution. If some routine remedy solves a problem, that’s good enough for me.
Coincidence: shortly after I wrote this comment I had a reply to a comment I’d left on another blog, and it included the phrase “trying creative options to improve the signal!”
There *is* something that appeals to me in the image of trying *destructive* options to improve a signal…stomping wildly on a transmitter and receiver, perhaps? 😉
I’ll do my best to think of more *productive* ways to express the idea. 😀 If taken to its theo-logical extreme, creativity among humans is acting in imitation of The Creator, and as such I should think could not possibly be classified as creative in Barzun’s purist sense, but I agree that the term is in any case used in a decidedly diluted way nowadays, a sin of which I am clearly (and frequently) guilty. ‘Invention’ would seem to invite the same criticism; merely discussing the process as ‘thinking’ doesn’t differentiate the pleasurable playful kind enough from the practical survival skills employed by the ol’ lobes, and you know that I think a fair amount of what’s talked about as ‘inspiration’ is really somewhere quite removed on the spectrum toward the elbow-grease-plus-good-luck end than nearer that of the divine breath. For the most part, I tend to see the whole of the thinking-doing-making process as rather hard to predict, let alone pin down with a name, and I fall back on lazy linguistics too often. Good to be called on it. We shall see if I behave any better as I continue blogging, though I don’t recommend that you hold your breath–divine or otherwise–while waiting! 😉
Fantastic image for this post, Kathryn.
Thank you kindly, Sir. 🙂