In its most recent issue, Atlantic Magazine discusses human creativity.  Why are some people more creative than others?  Why is it that creativity frequently comes at the expense of sanity?  What is the essence of the creative mind?  From looking at the riddle of the movie Beautiful Mind, the astounding musical collaboration of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and more, this issue thinks about the marvel of human dream and imagination.
     Fundamentally, the creative person is the person who thinks outside the box, the person who is willing to imagine and ponder in ways that have not been done before.  The mathematician of Beautiful Mind could see patterns that no one else could.  Lennon and McCartney could visualize music in a way that no one else could see.  Albert Einstein could develop ways of viewing reality that no one else had thought about.  In every instance, creativity was looking at everything in a fundamentally different way.
     This is why creativity is often stifled; this is why the creative person is often rejected or scorned; this is why new ideas are frequently ignored.  As lovers of control, humans are slow to accept anything that bursts their safe and proven categories of what is possible and true.
     And that's the point.  Be it new ideas about ourselves, our world, or God, we will never grasp them unless we are willing to admit that the way we have always done things is not right after all.  And that's hard, often unbearably hard.  We are loathe to give what we know.
     One of the greatest lessons we can learn as human beings is that when we think we know, we really do not.  At some point, we need to embrace faith.  We need to recognize that ultimately we do not so much live by what we know but by what we do not.  We are constantly knocking on the door of knowing.