Family and Creativity

When I think of family the first thing that comes to mind is food and all the time we spend together around the dinner table.  So as I thought of ways how the topic of family makes me more creative I kept coming back to food.

I quickly came to realize that by eating dinner with my family all those years and as I continue to do so, I am enhancing my creativity.  I decided that there are three fundamental ways that eating dinner as a family makes me more creative.  First, meals are about sharing.  Not just the food being served, but ideas, stories, and advice.  The sharing of ideas makes me more creative because it increases the number of ideas that I possess.  Even if everyone in the family would rather be some where else, for that hour of eating, the members of the family have to share their food, thoughts and ideas.  I read an online TIME magazine article this past week about eating dinner as a family.  The title of the article was The Magic of the Family Meal and it basically talked about all the benefits of eating dinner together.  The following is a quote that supports my point of sharing and family meals.

Secondly, family meals involve interacting and creating.  The dinner table is a platform for bouncing ideas off an audience and working together to solve problems.  Making dinner for my family was the first time I was really trying to please the audience with something I created.  I do the same things today as I create designs for much larger audiences.  Developing a meal for a family that pleases everyone requires use of a creative mind.  Cooking meals that are colorful is a way to add nutrition to meals as well as appealing to our other senses.  The following picture is of a colorful meal complete with most of the necessary food groups.  I become more creative as I plan similar meals for my family.

Finally, eating dinner as a family makes me more creative because of all the different point of views.  I come from a family of six and even though we were all raised similarly, no two members of the family think alike.  Communicating our own views sparks my creativity because it gives me a different angle of looking at things.  Even now as I eat dinner in the cafe with the family I am apart of here at school everyone has their on way of thinking and if we weren't stuck eating together every night a lot of the ideas might never be expressed.  The following is a YouTube link to a humorous clip from the movie, The Break-Up.  Although they might not all want to be there they are interacting and receiving points of views that they would have not experienced if they were not sitting together as a family.  In this way creativity is being increased.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdrHecN3ZhI

Sharing ideas, interacting with one another, and collecting different points of view are all ways that increase my creativity.  Through spending time with my family during meals I have done all these things.