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In the clas­si­fied sec­tion of a daily news­pa­per an advert­ise­ment reads: “Old prob­lem look­ing for a way out”.

If I find a solu­tion to that old prob­lem, do I become part of the “cre­at­ive” group of humans? If I spend time and energy, elab­or­at­ing this new solu­tion and then stop, will I have reached my goal?

I would think not. The answer I have worked so hard to elab­or­ate needs also to be eleg­ant, uncom­mon, unique and should enjoy sim­ple qual­it­ies to con­vert and be adop­ted.

I could have also come across a bril­liant idea acci­dent­ally and the eureka moment will then be at hand.

When we look back on our child­hood, we relive moments of joy and peace we sel­dom exper­i­ence when we grow up. Our life was easy then and great things were dis­covered by our explor­ing minds, things we looked upon as small mir­acles. Our par­ents were gods who could chase out demons from under the bed, wipe a tear from our eyes and bring back a smile to our lips, just by read­ing a bed­time story. Life was idyll­ic and the cre­ativ­ity of a mother or father was the res­ol­u­tion to our fears.

Is this seem­ingly straight­for­ward solu­tion applic­able in our world? Can we find today an answer to the prob­lems of pover­ty, water, wars, injustice, envir­on­ment­al prob­lems and oth­er appar­ently unsolv­able tra­gedies?

Can we recall the cre­ativ­ity of the archi­tect who added the gar­goyles to the spires of the cathed­rals, and then added a net­work of pipes to col­lect clean water, from their splash­ing mouths, for the thirsty? Or ima­gine the bent backs of build­ers attempt­ing to stop a wall from fall­ing and design­ing the fly­ing but­tresses that made these majestic build­ings so eleg­ant and last­ing? Can we wait for hun­dreds of years to redis­cov­er the magic of cement, lost in the middle ages, to give life to the beau­ty of Le Corbusier designs?

We are today, more than any oth­er time, await­ing the return of Marco Polo to Venice. We look for­ward to the “The paper, gun­powder and com­pass to reshape the world”, to para­phrase Francis Bacon.

The blank sheet of paper and the magic fin­gers of an ori­gami mas­ter turns into a bird, a plane and in the hands of an enchanted child, Superman. A 3D print­er and some dis­carded tis­sue from an old man’s scar is built into an aorta that will replace his fail­ing artery. An artist, a sci­ent­ist, a math­em­atician will retreat in their bubble, will live in another dimen­sion where everything is pos­sible. In this world, par­al­lels will join, Pythagoras will be wrong, Picasso will see Guernica, and I would write a short doc­u­ment to describe the unfathom­able. Then, things we took for gran­ted will stand down and a sim­ple sum will nev­er give the same res­ults.

By the lovely AIDA