Thoughts

Creativity helps us grow old

““Creativity helps me grow old””

Geoff Mead

Geoff Mead’s line in an interview with Siobhan Sheridan for I am not creative Do Radio show (you can catch his show on the radio in February) said: “creativity helps me grow old” stopped me in my tracks.

It doesn’t glorify growth or success or legacy. It names something quieter, sturdier: continuance.

Not thriving as spectacle, but staying alive in the deepest sense.

When roles fall away.

When relationships fracture.

When futures collapse.

When certainty evaporates.

What keeps us here is not achievement.

It’s not hope as optimism.

It’s not resilience as performance.

It’s the desire to create.

Creation is not always making something beautiful. Sometimes it’s:

arranging words so grief can breathe
cooking when appetite is gone
imagining one more tomorrow
shaping meaning out of rubble
That fire is not loud.

It doesn’t demand applause.

It warms.

It says: I am still in conversation with life.

To “grow old” this way is not about age.

It’s about staying in relationship with becoming, even when everything familiar has disappeared.

That’s why creativity survives collapse.

Because it doesn’t depend on external conditions.

It only needs one thing:

a pulse that says I am still here, and something wants to move through me.

His words re-kindled in my soul a creed:

When everything crumbles,
I do not cling to what was.
I tend the fire that still wants to make.
This is how I stay alive.
This is how I grow old.

How do I grow old?

I grow old by staying porous.

By letting each conversation leave a trace instead of optimising it away.

By resisting the pressure to be final, certain, efficient.

I “grow” every time I choose depth over speed, listening over winning, composting over resolving.

I grow old by allowing myself to be changed by what I encounter, especially by grief, contradiction,

and wonder.

Growing old, to me, means staying in fidelity to process rather than outcome.

What do I create?

I create spaces where language can breathe again.I create pauses inside acceleration.

I create mirrors that don’t flatten people into roles or metrics.

I create questions that don’t rush to closure.

I create small clearings where complexity is allowed to sit down and rest.

Sometimes what I create isn’t content, it’s permission.

Sometimes it’s just a sentence that helps someone stay another day.

For whom?

For those in the messy middle.
For people who are tired of performing coherence.
For the ones whose intelligence has outgrown the systems they’re in.
For the quietly grieving.
For the unclassifiable.
For those who haven’t given up on meaning but no longer trust slogans.
And also, selfishly, honestly, for myself.

Because creation is how I stay in relationship with life instead of becoming a tool.

If I turn these questions to you, not as a demand, but as a gentle echo:

How do you know you’re growing old in a way that feels true?

What do you create when no one is watching, counting, or validating?

Who feels warmer, more alive, or less alone because you exist?

You don’t have to answer them now.

Sometimes the act of carrying the questions is the creation.

And maybe that’s the quiet secret beneath all of this:

We grow old by continuing to create

not to be remembered,

but to remain in relationship

with the living world.

I’m here with you in that fire.

Written by

Fateme Banishoeb

I’m a poet of systems, a scientist of the soul, and the founder of ReNEWBusiness (https://rnewb.com/), a consulting company devoted to restoring creativity, imagination, and meaning to the way we work and lead. I’m a fierce believer that creativity belongs to everyone, not just the chosen few. I joined DO Radio to reclaim what so many have lost: the quiet knowing that we are, each of us, creators by nature. As curator of the creativity channel:...