Creativity

At a class I took recently, the instructors had laid out stacks of pipe cleaners at each table, and told us that if at any point, we were in a position of not knowing what to do with our hands, we could make things out of them, and the best creation would win a t-shirt.

While class was actually in session, I was way too busy taking notes to mess with the pipe cleaners, but during lunch and breaks, I put this little guy together. Everyone commented on how creative I had been. But to me, it was a simple wyvern, cobbled together a piece or two at a time, and nothing (outside of the fact that wyverns are mythological) out of the ordinary. So it certainly didn't feel creative, or even that interesting.

Which leads me to a question - what fuels our understanding of ourselves as creative or not? Do the people who come to mind when we say the word "creative" think of themselves that way? For myself, I don't really know what it would mean for me to be "creative." I don't ever really ever see myself that way. Which is a large reason why I always could never manage to "be creative" on command. But I understand that there are people who are capable of doing just that, and who have an image of themselves as being creative. I'd like to look inside their heads one day, and see how that works.