179. Creative Reflection

Every experience benefits creativity. An experience might inspire a creative impulse or a new project. It might combine with other experiences to influence the direction of future creative efforts. Or it might offer little on the surface, but bring forward an important insight through a careful investigation of its qualities.

In every case, the full value of the experience is only realized through reflection. To reflect is more than simply to remember the events of the experience as though you were reciting them to a friend. It involves a deeper exploration of the experience and all of its facets. It means looking carefully at the thoughts, feelings, and intuitions that arose both during the experience and afterwards.

By reflecting you not only relive your experience, you also observe it from a new point of view. You witness it as a third-person observer, and in doing so, you allow yourself to uncover more than what might have been apparent to you in the original moment.

Reflection is therefore a way of training the attention, a way of enabling ourselves to see more than we otherwise would. This is partly because our memories contain more than we realize, and what might escape notice in the moment can later reveal something valuable. But our memories are also imperfect. They contain gaps and it is only the imagination that can fill them. This gives us reason to be somewhat skeptical of the specific details they contain.

But the creative value of reflection is only enhanced by the imagination’s efforts. By constructing a more coherent and beautiful story than memory alone can provide, the imagination helps us see truths that would otherwise remain hidden. And it should be no surprise that aesthetic truths can be found even in the midst of what is partially fabricated. Works of fiction can be enormously helpful for understanding life, and this could not happen were they any less true than life itself.

Through reflection, we use all of our mental powers — thought, reason, memory, and imagination — to recreate our experiences. In doing so, we generate new material to further expand our awareness, which in turn allows new creative intuitions to be born.