Gaining Back Creativity Lost From Childhood

My mom tells me the story about when I first learned to write. I generally was an ambidextrous child, and decided to write with both of my hands, instead of just one. 

Well apparently while in kindergarten I would write one line of text from left to right with my right hand, followed by a line of text from right to left with my left hand. So every other line I wrote was backward (as we all know, we read from left to right).

So my teacher told my mom that I have to pick a hand. I don't remember this conversation, but I guess I chose my right.

I told this story to someone not too long ago, and she replied with an interesting comment. She said, "wow, your creativity as a child was completely suppressed!" 

She made an interesting point. My untrained, non-jaded brain as a 4 year old chose to do something in a different way. Not just stick with one, dominant hand but rather exercise both. However, I was forced by my superiors to do things the "right" way.

Ok, well I grew up getting mostly A's in school and getting into and graduating from an affordable college that I wanted to attend and following that up with a graduate degree. Rule following can be good and often necessary.

But this story made me think. Thinking outside of the box has always been in me but over time I became just another constant rule follower. It took almost 25 years to pass before I realized that in doing this I may have lost the instinctive, creative ability with which I was born. 

Abilities to do things like create a business, do something I'm passionate about and be happy and successful by my standards and not just everyone else's who are just following the herd. 

So was it a good thing that i was forced to write with one hand? I'm not sure. Maybe if my teacher and parents didn't introduce to me this structure I would be struggling today to keep order in my life, find jobs and deal with challenges deliberately and practically. Maybe not.

What i do know is that it never hurts to flex our creative muscles as adults. Maybe every once and a while we should pretend to be 4 years old again.