Lately I feel as if I have been presented with a sumptuous feast of creative opportunities. Just like the fashion system, categories and boundaries for how I think about life and work are softening and becoming ever more fluid.  Huge open spaces call to me waiting to be filled with something new, something that has never been there before. They still remain amorphous shadows but faint outlines are beginning to appear.  I feel a new burst of creative energy as I wait patiently here in the “not knowing”.  I become more convinced in my life as as a fashion person and as a professor of social welfare that during this time in history the way forward is through ideas that have not been thought before. Technology has brought a kind of  fourth “industrial revolution”  where the old is becoming obsolete and the new has not yet started to form. It is only beginning but it is happening fast.

During uncertain times such as these fear makes some of us want to regress, go back and nostalgia reigns.  I have moments of melancholia that it is hard not to succumb to. It is in these “in-between times” that I find it ever more  important to surround myself with those thinkers and creatives who embrace fluidity, who work across and in-between the margins and see not the destruction of something old but the creation of something new.  This is probably an artifact of me having embraced interdisciplinarity as a path to utopian and pragmatic problem-solving for most of my career.  I have received comments and emails recently from those who are trying to find how to live creatively in the in-between time. They are ready to move into this undefined space with a new idea, a different way of being, a different way to work or even a different way of dressing. All risks, all important. They feel emboldened by seeing someone like myself climbing stairs when I have no idea what or who awaits me on top. I hope you know that you give me courage and inspiration to further climb and  not be afraid of what I might find or who I may encounter. I feel you at my back, right behind me. In times of destruction and dismantling there has always been a powerful human urge to respond by procreating. I am feeling more and more that this creative urge is what must be nurtured now.  Fashion has been giving me a new language and way to engage in a different kind of conversation.  For me it is the center of my mind map and right now webs are forming all over my page.

What creative urge are you nurturing right now?