If you have time to watch one talk this week, I can’t recommend highly enough Neil Gaiman’s talk on the human imperative to make good art.

Though he’s talking to arts graduates (at the University of Philadelphia) his advice – a passionate plea that we not hold back our creative faculties – is a powerful invitation to all of us, whether we consider ourselves ‘artists’ or not, to live our lives themselves, as Abraham Joshua Heschel recommended, as art.

His is a vital voice in a world where we’ll all too quickly reduce ourselves and those around us to ‘behaviours’, to units of production, to the product of neurons firing or genes expressing themselves, or to passive consumers – and in the process forget to make the contribution that’s really possible for us.

Photo Credit: Vilseskogen via Compfight cc