ReZoom

Our Creativity Expert begins a journey inward by exploring what is unique about his generation.

James Baldwin once remarked that moving to Paris turned him into an American. When I moved from Tennessee to Pennsylvania three years ago, I learned that I'm definitely a Southerner. And now I have discovered that reaching midlife — right, as if I'm going to live for a century — has made me feel, for the first time, part of my generation.

I've skipped some of the milestones of aging. I spent my teen years in a wheelchair with arthritis and graduated high school two years late, after my former schoolmates were gone. I don't have children; I've been a freelance writer working outside offices for twelve years; my wife is 16 years younger than I am; my friends range from 20 to 83. I forgot I had a generation.

Then one day a magazine editor asked me to write about baby boomers' music. Soon I was listening to Aretha Franklin spelling out her demands and the Eagles warning about that dangerous hotel on the West Coast. My mind filled with images of what we've shared as the first recorded, instant-replay generation, and I began to read more about the music and books and movies of my own era. When ReZoom suggested I write a column, I knew I wanted to explore what I write about in my books: creativity, discovery, play and where you find these at their best — in the arts and sciences.

We humans talk about creativity and imagination as if we invented them. Yet a beaver has at least some kind of mental image of a dam in mind when it begins felling trees, and a mouse can't navigate the maze that a scientist places between it and a snack without a rudimentary imagination. And what about all those chimpanzees who perform practical jokes and then laugh maniacally? Creativity and imagination are older then we are; they're in our blood.

Because I find evidence more entertaining than theories, in "Creative Approach" I'll interview poets and comedians, saxophonists and cartoonists. These people are aiming their imagination at the world like a spotlight and in the process changing themselves — and, at least a little, changing the world.

I've always liked that optimistic-sounding remark from The Tempest: "What's past is prologue." It's only part of a speech by the talkative Antonio, but I've stolen these four words and hung them over this column. What could be better than having a few decades behind us to prepare us for the adventures ahead? The people you will meet in "Boomerang" know that the past is prologue. They know that the past is only the road that brought us here. The future is the party we came for.

Michael Sims is the author of "Adam's Navel" and other nonfiction books, including the forthcoming "Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination." He writes for The Washington Post, L. A. Times, and many other publications.