Is age creativity’s biggest enemy? I have often wondered about this, but it was not until I read a recent article highlighting the brutal fact that most of the world’s greatest creative minds were in their 20’s and 30’s, that my self-doubt went through the roof. For those of us who have flown past those golden years too long ago, such pronouncements hit home with the subtle finesse of a baseball bat. Are we older folks doomed to creative oblivion? Perhaps longevity is not as much of a virtue as we thought it was, but be that as it may, we the forgone should not take this creative excommunication without a fight. We must do so even when accepting the fact that even the best of wines have their peaks and their valleys. In that unpredictable fluctuation between glory and decay, there is no arguing that some of these wines whose lives have been spent in dark, dusty cellars, do show glorious development with time. Who would have known, longevity challenging youth after all.

However, this is not to say that time, that most endangered depleted resource in the world, has been rendered irrelevant. Not by a long shot. In fact, time is always a factor, but perhaps in a more complex way than what the creativity doomsayers would have us believe. Time, in all its hurried glory, is both oasis and desert. Youth enjoys it in abundance, but at the expense of experience; age starves you of it, while overfeeding you with experience. Both realities fertile grounds for blooming creativity, provided one has not given up on the process. And while we could conclude that creativity, in its most absolute form, may not be age dependent, we may have to concede that the willingness to create, that complex blend of passion, opportunity, and industry, may have something to do with age. The passage of time may never diminish our ability to imagine, but it does take its toll on our ability to realize.

So, what must we do to dispel that notion that creativity only belongs to the young? The answer (or at least part of it) may lie in our ability to divest ourselves of distractions, or of what some pundits have dubbed “friction” impeding the creative process. Voices telling us that we are past our prime. Friction. Listening to people’s judgments. Friction. Thinking that we are incapable of doing something. Friction. Expecting recognition. Friction. Talking ourselves out of new ventures. Friction. And above all, not believing in ourselves. Major friction. All of these diversions, and many others, are the weight that keeps holding us back. They weight all of us down with the insensitive cruelty of a maritime storm. Time, while rewarding us with experience, also fills our plate with the accumulated aftereffects of past passions and responsibilities. It certainly doesn’t make matters any easier.

But the wisdom that comes with time may prove to be the great antidote with which to treat the statistical diminution of our creative lives. That wisdom is the key to distinguishing between the important and the superfluous in our daily lives. More than that, it gives us a compass by which to better navigate between the futile and the possible. Like the steering of a major cruise ship, experience tells us at what point to begin to turn the wheel to avoid being too late to be able to dock successfully downstream. Wait too long and failure is inevitable. Start too early and achieve the same results. Such is the case of the creative life. At some point in everyone’s life, it is too late to achieve some things, but sufficiently early enough to achieve others. With some hope, it is the wisdom of the years that will help us realize where that invisible line of demarcation lie between these two time-consuming, warring foes. By all measures, it is a gut-wrenching decision, so choosing wisely on where to apply the famous “Curly’s Law” from the movie City Slickers will make all the difference.