Creativity: The Duty of Humanity

Nature is so interesting. It gives us its gifts in raw forms and expects us to fashion out our necessities from them. It does owe us the raw material, but we are thrust with the mandate to produce what we need from them.

Proverbially, we say ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. This is not just true about lemons but so true of everything life throws at us; every event in our life has a seed of greatness in them and it always turns out according to the desires we demand of them.

This morning while thinking about today’s post, the plant, CORN, came to my mind and I pondered on it to see what to make of it. I began to ask what the uses of corn were. Interestingly I came up with a few.

Corn could be eaten primarily as boiled corn or roasted corn, we could be grind it to make pap, heat the pap further and wrap in leaves and you obtain solid pap (Èkò in the Yoruba native, an ethnic group in South West Nigeria), it could be boiled with beans as a real delicacy in South West Nigeria, it could be processed into custard, corn flakes, sweet corn for use in fried rice and salad preparation, used also as corn meal for animals to increase their weight and in the United States, corn is used to produce ethanol which is mixed with the US gasoline to reduce air pollution.

Whaoh, just one of nature’s gifts turns to a multitude of resource meeting our needs at different levels.

As it is with the corn, so it is with us. Life can choose to throw at us a sack letter, the death of a loved one, a failed business, a failed relationship, an health challenge etc and it expects us to make a product out of it, a product that benefits us and also benefits others around us passing through the same challenge.

But why does nature do this? Why not give to us the finished product? Why not give us boiled and roasted corn, the corn flakes, the ethanol, all in their refined and finished state?

Nature does this because it knows we have in us the power to create. We have the ability and spirit in us to bring forth life out of dead situations. Nature knows that the mandate to create has been passed from God to us because His seed remains in us and the same way God made animal skin into clothes, we can make whatever we desire from whatever situations we are going through.

The question then is : Do we trust ourselves as nature trusts us? Do we see in ourselves the god nature sees in us? Do we believe we have the ability to make lemonades out of the lemons we are given and ethanol from the corn delivered to us?