Dedicated to all my former students this Teachers’ Day.

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I am not an evolutionary biologist, nor am I a scientist of any kind; all I am is a poet, a writer, a thinker, and my own domain is the arts rather than the sciences. But today I will be using Darwin’s concept of naturalistic evolution to discuss the creative impulse, the force which drives us to make, to create, to impose meaning on this world in which we live.

We are makers, we are thinkers, and as far as life on our planet is concerned we are an intelligent species. We are in fact probably the most intelligent beings this world has ever produced, and our own name for ourselves — homo sapiens, wise man — highlights this distinctive characteristic. As far as Darwinian theory is concerned, this trait of ours evolved and lasted because it made us better-equipped to survive: it developed as a response to core biological imperatives — the need to find food, to reproduce, to survive in a hostile environment. Our intelligence as a species is the result of competition and the process of natural selection, and — combined with our abilities to work together and to use and manipulate objects — it is what has allowed us to become the dominant species on this planet. For most humans, the greatest threats to our continued survival no longer come from the natural world around us. They come, instead, from other humans and from the works of their minds and hands, and fortunately where the rule of law prevails such threats are relatively remote. But this has only been a fairly recent development in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history.

For a very long time we turned our natural intelligence to the question of survival, which loomed large in the collective minds of our species. We used our minds to hunt and to gather, and later on to plant and to build. But as simple survival became less and less of an immediate concern, our powers of thought and analysis no longer needed to be applied with such intensity to such problems. This left us with a lot of unused processing power. And all that mental capacity needed to be used. An old (probably Puritan) proverb states that “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”; in other words, if humans are not constantly kept preoccupied with the work of survival they become naturally inclined to reflect and think about the world around them. (And from the perspective of authoritarian dogmatists everywhere, unsanctioned thought is very bad indeed. But this is not an essay about them.)

Our minds naturally require stimulation, and we naturally seek it out; we have an evolutionarily derived need to make sense of the world, a side-effect of the analytical powers that helped us to devise tools and corrals and clothes and cabins and gardens. The two most numbing emotions a human can experience are boredom and futility: these have in common a sensation of hollowness, of emptiness, of waste. When we perceive a lack of meaning and personal fulfillment in our lives, we enter a state of anomie and depression; mental stimulation, on the other hand, causes us to feel that our lives make sense, have meaning, and are worthwhile. There is ample data to suggest that elderly persons who keep their minds busy after retirement live longer, happier lives than those who do not. The mind is like a muscle: we need to use it or lose it. It seems that once we stop learning, we start dying; and as the loss of one’s mind effectively means the loss of that which makes us uniquely human, mental stimulation and mental activity are fundamental imperatives for us all.

How then can we get the stimulation we require? The simplest, most obvious, and most common means is to seek the opposite of boredom, which is excitement. Now there is more to excitement than mere distraction: all of us require novelty for its own sake — new things, new thoughts, new ideas, new skills, new patterns to make sense of. Newness means new learning, new mental connections. We need to ward off for ourselves the creeping horror that there really is nothing new under the sun. Novelty is a good thing; and for many people, thankfully, novelty does seem to be enough.

But it is not enough for all of us. Many of us also seem to want some sort of framework by which to make sense of the world; we need to have an understanding of the world and of our place in it. As a species we have generally found this understanding in history, in myth, and in religion — especially in those religions which have some sort of goal to work towards, whether that goal be the attainment of nirvana or the coming of the Kingdom of God. We need goals, we need quests, and the less achievable those goals are the better. It is no accident that many people feel a sense of hollowness or disappointment after some significant life goal has been achieved: the quest which gave life meaning is now gone.

We have historically been very fond of what Jean-Francois Lyotard called “grand narratives” or metanarratives, enormous stories that help us to order our lives and give meaning to our worlds. Not many of those remain today, however, and few possess the universality they once did (except perhaps the grand narrative of scientific discovery, and even that is debatable). The twentieth century took the step of jettisoning many of these big mental frameworks, focusing instead on the fact that there is actually no inherent “meaning” of the sort we desire in the world around us, and choosing to emphasize the contigent and local aspects of our existence instead. We are now even giving up the more modern metanarratives of nationalism and Communism. The late modern (or postmodern) era took the next logical step: increasing the availability of stimulation in our lives via various forms of media to make up for our lack of metanarratives. Today we are also bringing back the myths, though we remain fully aware that they are myths: we tell stories about vampires, werewolves, zombies, superheroes, robots, wizards, pirates, ninjas, demons, aliens, elves. But for many people none of this is enough.

I am not going to offer a replacement metanarrative here; I do not really believe or trust in such things, and I think it good that they generally no longer have the power over our minds that they once did. But I do acknowledge that some people seem to feel lost without them. And so today I am going to suggest an alternative.

Enter art, and enter making. Art has always been with us as one of the by-products of our need to see and construct patterns in the world for ourselves. We are makers, creators, builders. We were born to see and to impose order, patterns, and systems on the world around us; that, after all, is really what intelligence is. We create, and we were born to create, meaning. It is painful for us to exist without it. Often today we think of art as a discrete field of human endeavour, set apart from the others. But today I would like to present the view that art is in fact an attitude of mind, and one which, if we let it, has the power to pervade everything we do. Art, as far as I am concerned, is precisely that which helps us to create meaning in our lives.

From this point on, I will define art as any focused, disciplined, pattern-creating human endeavour, not limiting the term to those areas generally known as the fine arts. Art, as I will use the term here, refers to any aspect of human life which involves concentrated, deliberate action: such actions are fundamentally creative (even if what is created is the smoking ruin of an enemy target). I acknowledge that this definition of art is very broad, and that it may not be to everyone’s taste. After all, such a definition could potentially be applied to almost anything we do, right down to the way a floor is swept or a diaper changed or the plumbing fixed (if those acts are carried out with sufficient focus and deliberation). Those who do not like my use of the term are free to substitute any words they prefer. The idea, in this case, is more important than the words used to articulate it.

Art requires material, and requires a certain ability to visualize what things could be. And that is precisely how we create meaning: by looking at the raw, random stuff of existence and turning it into something intelligible. A hill, for instance, is by itself just a hill. But the builder looks at it and sees a site for construction, the sculptor sees rock to be carved, the naturalist sees a habitat for species to be counted and categorized, the painter sees an arrangement of colours and tones, the poet sees material for a poem, the soldier sees high ground to be taken and controlled, the businessman sees a potential source of mineral resources, the lover sees a venue for romance. All these fields of endeavour can be understood as disciplines, as arts; and meaning is created when we take the raw stuff of existence and do something with it, when we use it as these people do — as material.

We all have our own predispositions towards various aspects of human endeavour; those become our disciplines, the things we become known for. Sometimes we call these disciplines our passions. But the latter word is somewhat overused these days, and sometimes becomes a source of anxiety. It shouldn’t be. If you’ve found your passion, great — pursue it! But if you haven’t, there’s no real need to go out looking for it. Work with what material you have. Here is my suggestion: practice living your life, in all its details, with focus, with presence, with deliberation. Explore the world, at the same time, in a continuous search for novelty and excitement (which — as long as they do not become distractions or escapes — are good things). And either you will naturally gravitate towards your passion, or it will naturally find you. Focus on making: making art, making beauty, making a difference (however you wish to define that). Transform the random stuff of existence into something that means something to someone. Keep on honing old skills and learning new things; make your entire life, in each moment, into a work of art. If you desperately want to understand where you belong in relation to the universe, think of it this way: you are here on earth to make it all make some kind of sense. You, as a human, exist to give some sort of meaning to the universe. So create as much as you can. And remember what you’ve done (it helps if you take notes.) So that in the end, when the question arises of what your life was all for, you will be able to point to what it is you have done, and say: that. That is what it was all for.