https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/
We have talked about this before on The Third Half. Phillippa Mole studied art at university alongside sport, then spent three decades as a sports psychologist, a GB bobsleigh athlete, a BBC broadcaster, a coach. The art never went away, she says, it was just bubbling under, unshown. She paints abstract now, chasing the feeling of movement rather than the thing itself, the kind of motion she spent half her life living through sport before she ever put it on canvas. April De Angelis trained as an actress, gave up on writing as a hopeless idea, then years later won a playwriting competition off the back of a leaflet and never looked back. Neither of them set out to become what they became. They just kept paying attention until something else became possible.
Imagination and creation are products of time and space.
Simple enough. Obvious, even.
Yet somewhere along the way we seem to have decided that every minute should be occupied, every silence filled and every empty corner of life optimised.
We carry entire libraries in our pockets but rarely sit long enough to read. We have access to more music, art, poetry and culture than any generation before us, yet somehow find ourselves scrolling past much of it in search of the next distraction.
The irony is that many of the things that make life richer require the very thing we seem least willing to give them: time.
A song is more than three minutes of entertainment. A painting is more than a splash of colour. A poem is more than words on a page. Art invites us to stop, observe, reflect and occasionally see the world differently.
That feels increasingly important. Neil Griffiths of the charity Arts Emergency made the same point recently, almost word for word, writing in Positive News about Ireland’s basic income for artists. The scheme has just been made permanent after the figures showed it paid for itself. One artist who benefited had been working part-time as a receptionist to cover her rent. Once that pressure lifted, she made her first film. The money didn’t buy her talent. It bought her time.
I have good Irish friends and find myself in Dublin a fair bit these days, so this one is for them, and for whoever out there is the next Joyce, Wilde or Heaney and doesn’t know it yet. Ireland has gone further than most in actually paying for that idea rather than just admiring it from a distance.
The world does not need another algorithm telling us what we already know.
It needs people willing to imagine something different.
The Irish have always seemed to understand this. For a relatively small island, Ireland has gifted the world an extraordinary number of storytellers, playwrights, musicians and poets, people who could take the ordinary and reveal something extraordinary within it. Not because they had better technology or bigger budgets, but because they paid attention. They noticed the details, the conversations, the landscapes, the humour and heartbreak of everyday life.
Great art rarely emerges from haste. It emerges from observation.
A musician sits with an idea until it becomes a melody. A writer wrestles with a sentence until it says exactly what it means. A poet finds a way to express something that everyone has felt but nobody has quite managed to describe.
Those things take time.
More importantly, they require space. Space to think, to wander, to be bored, to sit in a cafe, stare out of a train window, walk along a beach, listen to an old record or simply let the mind drift without purpose.
Many of the best ideas arrive when we stop trying so hard to find them. April still has half-written titles sitting on her computer, ideas she loved for four days and then quietly let go of on the fifth. They are not failures. They are the cost of doing the work at all.
Perhaps that is why art matters so much. Not because everyone should become an artist, but because art reminds us there is value beyond productivity, that not everything worthwhile can be measured, that beauty has a place in our lives. Creativity is not a luxury. It is part of what makes us human.
The next great poem, song, painting or story is probably already out there somewhere, waiting for someone to give it the time and space it deserves.
Maybe the challenge for all of us isn’t learning how to do more, but learning how to leave a little more room for imagination.
After all, imagination and creation are products of time and space.
The question is whether we are still prepared to make room for either.
People. Planet. Progress.
https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/