Creativity has always been one of the desired qualities of any good artist. Besides that, we all need creativity in our daily life to do all sort of complex tasks. Ever since man has always wanted to achieve more, it comes times when we just want to be more creative than before because of the ever increasing challenges that we face. Some people feel more creative in the presence of loved ones while some take inspiration from given places. Today we want to consider the question “Do drugs and alcohol make us creative” or better still “Do they increase our creativity?”
Is this discussion I think the definition of creativity will guide us much. Simple definitions of creativity are:
* the ability to create
* the ability to bring into existence
However these definitions are not good to work with and study drug and alcohol. So we will define creativity as the ability to organize basic ideas, objects, colors, sounds etc to form something pleasing, useful and original. Creativity in music is the ability to arrange basic sounds, instruments, voices and notes whereas in painting it is the arrangement of colors, lights, shadows and representations. It is possible to see that this holds for all the domains that require creativity. When God created the world, he separated light from darkness, waters above from waters below, oceans and seas from continents and so on. We can now go on to check to what extend can drugs and alcohol enhance our creativity.
When an individual consumes any drug or alcohol, it has a direct influence on our state of consciousness and alters our perception of reality and even time. In such a state in individual lose touch with the real world and sees all sorts of ideas, memories and images crossing his mind. This is the main thing that deceives people. In such as situation, the individual may seem to have ideas but lacks the rational state of mind to implement these ideas due to the effects of drugs on his mind. Drug and alcohol makes users become drowsy or sedated, may hinder an individual’s ability concentrate, may interfere with coordination, and may blow out of proportion the importance of insignificant thoughts or details.
Mindful of all these, there is no real base for saying that drugs and alcohol helps in any way our creativity. God created us in his image. Our ability to create is an inherited characteristic from God and is damaged when we carry out practices like drug and alcohol abuse which makes us hostile to God’s life.
Nelson Kana is a youth Worker in a local youth ministry in Cameroon and has been carrying out researches on drug and alcohol rehab among Youth. He is a strong advocate of rehab my mind changing.
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