What is Creative Reflection?

Every year-end, around the middle of December, when it is pleasantly cold and ample sunny I reflect on my year. What I achieved, where I fell, where I didn’t, what succeeded, what not.

The University of Edinburgh talks about four main creative ways to reflect:

Written Reflection;

Reflecting with others;

in Conversation with self; and

Creative media like photography, poems, painting etc. 

“Reflection will not just happen unless you create the space for it. We will just continue to move quickly from one thing to the next and not stop to reflect and recognize professional growth opportunities.”

The writer of Creativity: The key to problem solving, comments that “creativity is not as an art form or means of self-expression, but as a way of solving a problem. That’s what it’s really for. And the fewer options one has (lack of time, lack of budget etc), the more one relies on it.”

And that is what we are doing. We make reflection and artistry affair.

When the shame of failures and falls are stamped inside us we use creative reflection to solve a lot of knots and messes within us. As Harvard folks found out that failures and frustrations turned out to be a place of immense learning and growth and because we can’t control a dime we can at least tame our own wits and give few days to reflect on ourselves and make our lives more manageable. At the least.

The wide-eyed curiosity is what we need.

All of us who, are working an ordinary 9-5 job but can still see an old grandma on the moon or sonnets in the hustling streets full of people, we know we are reflecting creatively. Reflection is going inwards in response to the outward things. And just like the sun shines over the fields and the mountains we too let our sun fall on things within.

For example:

Can you make a story of your failure and narrate it to your friend or your child (just mildly if it is a child)? Did you learn something? Can you draw your feelings, and colour them in the required shade? Or if you can write it into a poem with no right rhyming? Can you sing your experiences in not-so-sophisticated lyrics and pretend no one’s listening?

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”

― John Dewey, American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.

Curious minds who inwardly want to be nosy to the world in a good way can reflect and turn our internal blah-blah into creative reflection and learn from those failures and setbacks. So, when I write letters to you here, I am attempting to make some extra bold steps to move away from the slippery world of urgency and find space for you to sit and ponder on the things that are also crucial for living – one is money, the other essentials are mostly invisible to the eye!

You may also like to read: What is Creativity and What We Found About It?