Box ? What Box ?

Box? What Box?

Reading last month’s OM on “What’s in that box?” triggered me to write this. Originality and creativity are highly sought after, however, in reality, more often than not, when we try to think unconventionally we are deemed “trying to act smart”. Creativity is considered a cunning way to get you out of trouble; originality is considered ugly because it has not been portrayed before anywhere else. Hence regularity and uniformity are preferred. So what is there really in or out of the box? Some of us can’t even decide whether we are in or out of the box. We try to encourage creativity yet we are doing the opposite thing: killing creativity and originality. This reminds me of the “pink shirt guys” from Short and Sweet. People shouting ideologies that they themselves can’t make heads or tails of. Thinking out of the box is good and important but the perturbations introduced when it is being implemented are the killing factor for creativity. Just like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle state: an observation cannot be made without affecting the system. Hence any form of “making sure” that creativity occurs, be it in the educational system or anywhere else, is affecting the originality of creativity itself. Therefore, we should not even visualize the box as the boundary, for in actuality there should not be a box in the first place.

               Ellie Chuah (Physics)