Ramla Akhtar

Summing up three years of my work for Triple Bottom Line Magazine, I watched a surprising conclusion emerge: It is our right to create, as individual humans, that entire groups of people are fighting for today.

Indeed, all the popular activism of the day is not the end in itself, but rather it is paving the path towards a place where individuals can create they way they choose. Of course, there’s still some agreement to be reached on the nature of The Creative Project. In fact, the process of attempting (and avoiding!) to reach this agreement or understanding is what ‘The Fight’ is.

So far down the evolutionary human journey, countless ideas about what-exactly-is-the-project and how-it-should-be-carried-out have been generated, tested, scrapped. Some have evolved, and thus become part of the living human consciousness and practice. Structures of living spaces, and uses of energy are some such resilient schemas which, once developed, have stuck around. Tools and their uses are another. It takes stepping back to the age when we humans lived in caves to truly appreciate the scope of our evolution.

While across the world evolution of the human journey is manifested in its various stages (some are ahead, some are trailing behind like the tail of the snake), it may safely be assumed that the most-evolved are now freely creating with responsibility, those behind them are learning to assume responsibility/authority that allows sustainable creativity, and those behind them are fighting for the right to create. This third bracket is where I’d put this Spring of Arab Uprisings (or whatever they call this thing now). Indeed, Egypt is now facing the next evolutionary challenge: assuming personal, individual responsibility, which in turn will enable authority. The success of the Egypt Revolution at this point, indeed, rests on how quickly individuals and clusters configure, how deeply they accept, and how ably they assume their respective responsibility.

Individuals across the globe are faced with this incredible evolutionary pressure. Some may not grasp what the worldwide pandemonium is all about, but certainly, societies are feeling the rush to do something. To… be creative.

CREATIVITY is the proverbial elephant in the room. It is being sensed, though not quite visible. Yet.

Aside: It is to discover this very elephant-in-the-room, CREATIVITY, that I am undertaking a creative retreat. Updates are posted here.