Do you consider yourself to be creative? Here’s how to be more creative.

My wife of 64 years died in 2021, and I was lost. She was my emotional support, and for a while, I was bereft of her stability which gave me purpose.

After several months of pain, I began to realize three things.

1. She would have told me that just as she was my support, I was her support, and I had the means to do for myself what I had been doing for her, so “stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with it.”
2. “Getting on with it” requires creating something.
3. Creating requires repeatedly asking, “What if?”

Many years earlier, I had enjoyed painting. I even took lessons, but interestingly, my teachers focused not on drawing but on designing. So, I always struggled to render, and much of what I did was more design than drawing.

I envied Salvador Dali, who may have been the greatest renderer in history, perhaps even better than Rembrandt. Dali could draw and paint not just beautifully and quickly but without showing brush strokes, as though snapping a photograph.

I decided to try turning my drawing liability into an asset by asking, “What if?” (i.e., what if I didn’t need to draw at all?)

At the time, monumental fires were raging in California and elsewhere. I had heard about terrified people being extracted by helicopter, and I wished to create a painting of such a scenario.

Somehow, I hadn’t been able to get it right. The helicopter repeatedly looked like a “not-helicopter.”

So, now I asked myself, what if I tried painting the terror, the fire (then being called a “firenado”), the rescue, and all the emotion, without drawing the helicopter or the fire.

And this is what I produced:

The title of the painting is: “Helicopter Escape from a Firenado.”

But where is the tornado caused by the ferocious heat of the fire (aka “firenado”)? It’s that evil thing in the center of the picture.

More importantly, where is the helicopter?

You’re in it, looking down at the terrified girl climbing the ladder.

I had asked myself, “What if I could illustrate a helicopter escape without drawing a helicopter.”

What if I could put a helicopter into your imagination, the viewer?

Might a focus on the emotions — the girl and the firenado — be more potent than any illustration of a helicopter I could produce?

Would the painting be more powerful or create a better message if it showed a helicopter?

Whether or not you love, hate, or are indifferent to the painting is less material than the process.

Beginning with the assumption that a painting of a helicopter should picture a helicopter, I asked, “What if that isn’t true”?

And that kind of question is the beginning of creativity.

It is the kind of question I suggest you ask when reading about economics and Monetary Sovereignty. What if the things so many of us assume aren’t true?

1. What if for “A” to influence “B,” there need not be some sort of connection between “A” and “B” (aka “locality)?
2. What if the thing called “federal debt” isn’t a federal debt
3. What if federal taxes don’t pay for federal spending, while state/local taxes do fund state/local government spending.
4. What if federal deficit spending doesn’t cause inflation, but actually can cure inflation?
5. What if money is not a physical thing but rather a mere concept that cannot be seen, felt, smelled, tasted, or heard?
6. And then again, what if Monetary Sovereignty itself isn’t true, and there is another explanation for what we believe to be reality?

“What if” is the most significant question in science. It is a question Einstein undoubtedly asked about time (What if time doesn’t pass the same for everyone and everything? What if you see the same speed of light regardless of your own speed?)

It is the question scientists continually ask (“What if reality is not as most of us think we experience it?”)

The “What if” question does not require changing your beliefs. It only asks you to imagine a scenario in which your beliefs are different.

For example, the question, “What if the moon does not exist?” could create an investigation of what the earth would be without a moon and why we might wish to believe in a mythical moon.

If that seems far-fetched, consider this: Everything you believe is not reality but rather the result of your sensing being interpreted by your brain.

You already know your brain can fool you; that is called “illusion.” So, how much of what you believe is an illusion created by your brain? Or is your brain an illusion?

What if “you” are not what you think you see in a mirror but are nothing more than a concept floating free in the ether, merely imagining, imagining, imagining?

What if “I think, therefore I am.” is not reality, but that thought itself needs no thinker?

Is all this any more fantastic than the entanglement of quantum mechanics?

If reality is not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory, then the case could be made that nothing is real, and everything is imagined, and “What if” makes perfect sense.

That kind of thinking is difficult. If I exist, I evolved to be sure of my existence in my imagination and belief.

But if you want to expand your imagination (whatever you may be), try imagining something you are absolutely sure about, then asking yourself the outcome of “What if?” that something you’re sure of were false.

It’s quite fun.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY