I believe we all share a basic and fundamental need to create, but that this need stems from a deeper desire than to just paint a painting or knit a sweater or write a blog post. We live in a chaotic world where many aspects of our existence are beyond our control. I think our creative needs stem from the deeper desire to order the chaos we live in, to establish some sort of understanding among that which, ultimately, we can't understand.

Order and understanding are necessary for human happiness; this continual search for happiness is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We all want to be happy, though I would content few of us really figure out how to do it. We strive to impose order and understanding because it is from this that happiness originates. Order and understanding give the illusion of control, and the illusion of control enables us to ignore our mortality and the reality that death could come at any moment.

As individuals, there is little we can do to mitigate the chaos that surrounds us and nothing we can do about the event demise of our consciousness. The small acts of creatively we engage in are the avenue we use to impose order and understanding on the world around us. When we create something, we understand it completely, from genesis to completion. We control it. We feel fulfilled and secure. We can even get this feeling through immersing ourselves in the creative expressions of others, such as movies, books and video games.

There's no mandated format for the expression of our creativity. In the past I wrote fiction - this blog is a renewed expression of my creative urge. In college I drew and painted. Software development might be viewed as a segment of Computer Science, but there's no denying the creative aspect of software programming. Tell five software engineers to build a program that does X and you will get five programs that do X, each written with a different structure and code base.

Every time you cook a meal (or even order one in a restaurant), or choose and outfit, or buy something, or write an email or letter, and get immersed in some form of entertainment, you are expressing your creativity. Here are a few more ways you can bring creativity into your life:

• Start a journal/diary
• Write a letter to a friend or relative
• Get a cook book and try some new recipes
• Get some plants to brighten up your rooms
• Add music every chance you get
• Read fiction
• Exercise (has a double benefit!)
• Play a game

As a further expression of my creativity, I'm going to add some of the stories I've written over the years. The first, Troder, is up - you can see the link under the Stories section in the upper left. Troder grew from the idea of a machine that allowed people to share physical sensations, only what if there was a machine that reversed what the other person felt?