We often think of creativity as something that peaks in our younger years: john Keats wrote all of his breathtaking poetry before age 25, and Keith Haring is recognized for redefining graffiti as art despite his death at just 31. In many ways,however,we don’t reach the height of our creative powers until middle age.Don’t be fooled into thinking that your creative years are behind you. If you are over 40, actually, your creativity is peaking now.The challenge is too overcome the paralysis that might be holding you back from exercising it.
Back in the 1950s, famed psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed stages of psychosocial development: After infancy, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, Erikson wrote that the next stage, true adulthood, was the opportunity for what he called “generativity,” or creating value beyond ourselves, lasting into the next generation. By the time we get to this stage, we have built skill, knowledge, and, most importantly, pattern recognition. Through years of accumulation, we see connections; we are more in touch with subconscious processes and hold a kind of transcendent knowledge. this accumulation gives rise to a sense that we are unique in how we’ve processed and integrated what we no.
We, middle-aged adults, possess a specific matrix of understanding that we long to share with the world-to help move it forward in some way. It’s a natural instinct for building a legacy, distinct from that of parenting.Somehow, all this knowledge and pattern recognition gets transformed internally and neurologically into creativity. We begin to see how things fit, how they can be different, additive, generative, and improved, whether in the form of new models and systems of work-related content, insights into unmet human needs, or new frameworks for spirituality, religion, and social structures.
Part of this instinct arises from an evolution. We are no longer constrained by what was imposed upon us earlier in life; we now answer to a call from our unique set of genes and experiences. This call comes from deep within, almost as primitive as the drive to rear our young. Perhaps this stage of generativity is a form of psychological survival, a way to avoid feeling depleted by a life of providing for others, instead affirming that we still count.