Creative Date Week 7 - Fall is Coming

I went Central Park on Friday hoping to spot some signs of fall. Though most of the trees are still green, there are a few trees started to turn red and yellow. The last time I experienced the fall season transition must trace back to 9 years ago when I left my home country to Singapore. I don’t mean that I never had a chance to experience the season again as I still traveled a lot in different countries every year and stayed in Sweden for half a year five years ago. When I was having the Swedish winter and spring season, the experience really recalls me back how different seasons have shaped our feelings and habits in a beautiful and amazing way. But after that, I only travel to other places for a week or two, it is completely different from living in a place for longer period of time. So when I wore my warm sweater and observed the subtle change of leaves' color in the Central Park, I realized again how important season means to me, and also how subtle it is to set the backdrop of our day to day life while most of the time people just take it for granted.

Then I started to think about how creativity could be affected by the season and the nature associated with it. In Singapore, there are a lot of criticism around the country is lacking of creativity in the local education. It’s a relatively practical society where people usually go after business, law, medical fields. When I compare myself with local people who have never lived overseas, I noticed that many people are actually quite distance from the nature. Even the city is often called as garden city or forest city but it actually does not have enough land for agriculture and the real forest. Every piece of land is designed dedicatedly and intentionally. As a result, not many people have stayed in the real farms or countrysides, nor have them experienced the kind of nature with ongoing seasons change. Many people have limited knowledge around how food are grown or produced, what seasons produce what kind of food. Supermarkets provide one stop solutions on everything that people need. I remember there was one time I brought chestnut with the shell into the office, and many of my colleagues who are in their mid life have never saw a chestnut in the shell and have no idea they should peel the shell off in order to eat them. The only chestnut they know about is the processed and sugar-coated one sitting on the supermarket shelf with the nice package. Some of them even refuse to try as they think it looks too hard and messy to eat. Moments like this happened to me a lot. Also when I talked about weather and seasons, it's often impossible for many local friends to relate that experience to themselves. Even some of them are well traveled, they still told me that they feel more comfortable and safe in an unchanged warm weather with cool air conditioners all the time: "We are getting too used to it!"

But to me, many of the creative ideas and inspirations actually come from the experiences with variable nature and unpredictability. If a place has constant temperature with never-changed look all the time, it is hard to stimulate the creative process since the singular life experience may be challenging for people to image something out of norm. Many people may think Singapore is more like a utopia society with beautiful urban planing, stable and organized social structure. But I personally believe that chaos is needed for creating new things. No matter the chaos is in the varying season, nature or the social system, it gives space for people to view the world differently, think critically and eventually become more creative.