The winds of March

Lyrics are hard to come up with: "The winds of March that made my heart a dancer / A telephone that rings, but who's to answer? / And still the ghost of you clings/ These foolish things / Remind me of you." That is just priceless. Yet the bridge of that song is weak: "You came, you saw, you conquered me" {that part's good} but "When you did that to me / I knew somehow / It had to be..." is not all that great. None of the lyrics I have written approach that level, so I guess nobody notices that the second half of a bridge of a classic song isn't great.

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Who would have thought that lyrics would be my challenge? I was reading an article linked to by Clarissa about raising a creative child. Apparently Nobel prize scientists are more likely to have painted or composed music than the average scientist. Really good scholarship is creative, not mundane.

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If you have a PhD, you are in the top 2% of the country, in terms of educational attainment. If you actually do research, you are in the top half of that 2%, and if you are a leader in research, a top expert on something or another, you are at the top of that half. It makes sense to think that the very top people in any field would be highly creative. I remember a theoretical physicist at my undergrad institution who would just walk all day absent-mindedly through campus. He was working. I don't know if he ever made that breakthrough he was seeking.

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Most people are not creative in the deep sense. I hate it when the word is used for someone who just isn't all that disciplined. I don't know if you can force it either. You kind of have to let it happen. Probably, if you feel the educational institution has ironed all the creativity out of you, you might not have been that creative in the first place, because creativity is actually a stronger force than that.