Is A Creative Thinking Decidedly Enough?
Is a creative thinking the only essential thing to make us keep surviving? Before stepping further, I want to highlight why I use “surviving” as the purpose of it. Absolutely, we can put other terms, such as “living”, “being happy”, “improving ourselves”, and the like. At least we are agreeing each other that the creative thinking surely helps us, or we can claim that it is exceedingly foundational both in and for our life.
Undeniably, all people are in need of a creative thinking to make their lives still go on. What I mean on the creative thinking is all activities we do or undergo to be able to “take an alternative thinking” than others. An alternative thinking is surely essential for the continuity of our lives in the middle of “the sameness” attacking our uniform mindset. It will be a sort of a helper for us to think creatively in doing “innovation” or “discovery”, or even “invention” in the hope of taking a further step than others.
We really need an “unorthodox way” in thinking, or an “alternative path” to obtain a step ahead. It is crucial to obtain that to overcome our problem, one solution, which is the creative thinking. That really means that we have to consistently sharpen our creativity and at once polish our thinking in order to acquire the creative thinking. Definitely, hardly can we immediately obtain it without doing a routine practice every single time. It is not a sort of sacred inspiration falling from the sky, but it is our continual process in breathing the life. It is fortunate enough for people to be accustomed to thinking creatively, but it does not mean that others cannot achieve the same point as the people have been.
Sadly, we must face a huge question, “Is the creative thinking immensely enough?” I do not reckon so, because usually, or mostly, a creative thinking appears very abruptly, and the owner of it often does not examine meticulously the idea of her or his creative thinking itself. Then, the idea of it is going to fail to be implemented in a case, mostly, since (s)he — solely using her or his creative thinking — does not have an occasion to interrogate, test, or probe the idea methodically. A creative thinking is surely not enough in each case. We need another horizon, precisely the other hand of it, the other facet or angle, to complement the creative thinking itself. What is that? It is a critical thinking.
In this context, a critical thinking has to come to helping or propping the creative thinking in a firm position. What the critical thinking should do is comprehensively scrutinize the body of the idea, thoroughly examine the structure and its coherence of the idea, closely assess the other possibilities which threaten its viability, and rigorously continue reviewing and predicting the sustainability of the idea. Those at least become the tasks of the critical thinking.
Letting a creative thinking walk alone is definitely problematic since a creative thinking indeed needs a significant companion as well as a close partner to be able to confirm, supervise, and converse the progression of the idea itself. A creative thinking by itself is vulnerable enough to being destructed, to being failed, and even to being “utopian” or unrealistic, thus a critical thinking has to participate in analysing in detail what the creative thinking is going to do. Even, that we merely count on a creative thinking can become a calamity — because of being useless if we cannot go with that. Hence, a critical thinking must exist to elude such a terrifying calamity, and it is going to be successful in carrying on the idea provided that the critical thinking becomes the compass of the idea to direct where to move, and becomes the solidifying system, a sort of glue, to keep sticking or corresponding to the factual reality, lest the idea not be stray.[]