Creativity is something people usually associate with painting a picture or writing a story or something like that, but I think its broader definition is important to remember. "Creativity," says the almighty Wikipedia, "is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created." "Something new" is a seemingly mundane phrase that I think has much more meaning than we give it credit for; what it really means is "there is now something where before there was no such thing."
Creativity isn't strictly human, either, though we seem to be the only beings truly capable of relating to it and performing it. For instance, at the very beginning of things, all the universe existed in a hyper-concentrated blob, wherein temperatures must have been so high that we can't accurately apply our modern rules of physics to it. At some point, the blob underwent a cataclysm of indescribably huge proportions, resulting in the blob un-blobbing. As it expanded, the blob also cooled.
At one point during the Great Un-Blobbing, atoms formed. It's easy to read that sentence very casually, "oh, atoms, those things that are really small and make up stuff," but I want to stress exactly how remarkable that event actually was. In our studies, we've found atoms to be the essential building blocks of us and everything around us, and they've existed for huge amounts of time, so a human perspective can very easily turn "an unthinkably long time" into "forever." But think about it: at this point in the Big Bang, there weren't any atoms, and then all of a sudden there were.
Skip forward an unthinkably long time, and we have stars forming out of those atoms through gravitational runaway. At this point, pretty much everything is hydrogen, and if it isn't hydrogen it's helium resulting from hydrogen being fused. Everything's cooking along nicely, until suddenly, oh no! Some stars run out of hydrogen to fuse. Stars rely partially on the energy of fusion to hold their structure, and when they run out of fuel they start to collapse.
This has never happened before either; stars have been for a long time, but never has there been a collapsing star. Again, all creation was totally uncertain as to what would happen when these crumbling suns passed their breaking point. What knew? It might have been the end of everything; there was no precedent for this solar tomfoolery.
But it wasn't the end of everything. The endgame of any star can result in a display of godlike destructive power, but out of this cataclysm came something new. Fusion of new elements happened. Where there had previously been hydrogen and its helium cousins, suddenly carbon and other elements were splattered out into the cosmos. Now this was interesting.
So, we skip another indescribably long and important period of time, and our little planet has collapsed together from swirling dust and gravel. Theia has come by and nearly destroyed it, ultimately forming the moon-Earth complex. The surface of the planet resembles how most people today would draw hell; meteors slam down into the surface with unpleasant regularity, the air is mostly ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide, the surface is still so hot as to be liquid in many places, and so on. It's called the Hadean Eon, to give you an idea.
Let me be clear: nothing is alive on this version of Earth. Nothing swims in the hot baths of acid, nothing crawls over the burning rocks. Nothing flies. Hell, there's barely enough of an atmosphere for flight to even theoretically work. "Inhospitable" isn't the word.
And yet, suddenly, at some point, something was. We still struggle to figure out when, and how, and what exactly, but something happened. A crude sort of membrane developed, the first example of something with an inside and outside, and in that little chamber tiny molecules collided to form bigger molecules and then suddenly it lived.
We'll ignore how breathtaking that is in the interest of speeding along as we follow our brave little post-Hadean hero. It, and its friends, soon discovered that the only way to continue being was to drink in the energy of the sun and use it to assemble other compounds, so they invented photosynthesis. This was great. Life was actually doing pretty well as the Earth began to relax and hell subsided. Great colonies of these old bacteria spread all over, replicating freely.
They, unfortunately, had made a crippling oversight in their development; they made oxygen through photosynthesis, and there was only so much oxygen the earth's iron and oceans could absorb. When the oxygen level in the atmosphere passed that point, it was discovered that oxygen is poisonous to the things that were making it.
Uh. Damn!
So, yet another change was necessary. Through yet another incredibly complex, time-consuming, poorly-understood process, the tiny organisms learned to live in groups and specialize, ultimately forming single larger masses that we currently know as eukaryotes, or, with a little extrapolation, us.
At all these junctures, something arose, or happened, or was invented that had never been so before. These were not modifications of things, mind you, but entirely new things arising out of nothingness, at times when the universe could only be personified as shuffling its feet in uncertainty.
So the point I'm getting to is this: when you're uncertain in life, it's pretty normal. It was 14 billion years of uncertainty that created you, after all. Uncertainty is our natural state. The best things, the most lasting things, always arise out of turbulence of some kind, whether that means the boiling surface of the young Earth or the whirling, distracted realm of your mind.
Don't worry about being uncertain. It's a stressful sensation in itself, obviously, but what I mean is don't worry over the fact that you're worrying. "But I don't have all the data!" Nothing, and no one, ever has. Creativity is just the act of applying energy to uncertainty until something amazing is created.
TL;DR You are the latest in iterations beyond counting of uncertain things. There are infinitely varied and equally uncertain futures available to you, and all of them are the right one.
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