Creators believe

A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts . . .

~ Ernest Hemingway

Hardly.

Hemingway might not have survived childhood if not for the advances in medicine. He could not have traveled widely in safety if not for the adventurers before him. He could not have taken down the big game he so loved to hunt with a mere pull of his finger if not for the ten thousand advances in metallurgy, fabrication, ballistics and engineering up to his time.

Even Hemingway likely knew he was saying it for effect — for punch — not for truth. Honoring your own kind is an age old tendency.

Mothers believe they are the most important aspect of humanity (I’m with them). Scientists believe nothing matters more than advancement of human knowledge (I’m with them too). Those in the arts feel humanity would be bereft of creative meaning without them (I concur). The spiritually committed feel humanity would be utterly lost without spirituality (I’m with them too).

What you see over and over is how deep a vein of belief runs through creators in any field. All these threads weave a civilization worth living in.

What Hemingway was really saying was that he believed in literature so pervasively he was compelled to stake his life on it.

Creators believe.

If you too would be a creator of something meaningful in your life, you will need to dust away the layers to discover what small thing you truly believe, and build from there.

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Note: This is part of the What creators do series.