Improvisation ! ! !
In this section, I want to be very up front with some of the assumptions underlying my entire approach to improvisation in particular and creativity in general.
Creativity is a gift from God. [If you want to, we can spent a lot of time arguing about "who/what is God?" in some other forum - maybe over coffee or a beer - but the answer won't matter. For now, let just let "God" be "X" and I'll say "creativity is a gift from X" and we can move on.]
One of the biggest joys in life is exercising our creativity. Whether it's making a painting, performing a live, long-form improvisation in front of 300 people, or figuring out how to make a XSL transformation populate attributes in deeply nested structures, it's rewarding, it's energizing, it feels good.
Joy is one of the reasons we're here. And creativity is a joy. Without too much effort, I was able to find statements from several of the world's major religions that talk about creativity as a positive gift from our creator (Buddhist will, I hope, pardon my loose use of the term):
(Listings are alphabetical)