Lust
By Peter LloydThis is the fourth in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Lust.
I may be the most powerful of all the Seven Creative Juices, but I'm always the last to be recognized.
You give all sorts of awards to those who invent the devices that make your lives easier. You frame the portraits of artists and innovators on the covers of your popular magazines. But rare is the award recipient who gives me credit for his creative passion. Not that I need or even desire your applause. Most of the time I've got your undivided attention.
On the other hand, I always reward those I inspire. Let me tell you a story of reproductive fervor so long-suffering that it spans nearly two decades. It involved years of planning, patient love, the latest technology, lots of money, and an obscure convent of Italian nuns.
John, a medical student, was made incapable of having children in the process of treating a disease that would have killed him. But before he started the treatment, he made provisions. He stored his some of his young, reproductive potential in a facility New York.
That taken care of, he went on to become a doctor. For nearly 15 years, John paid annual fees to keep alive his hopes of fatherhood. Then he married Kris. When it was time to begin their family, they began an anxiously painful process of trying to conceive with the help of medical technology.
Their persistence paid off. But not until they enlisted the help of elderly nuns in Italy. You see, certain hormones in these older, childless women go into making a very special fertility drug the couple required. Now, Kris and John have a daughter. And they're starting the process all over again hoping for a second.
Who else but I could drive such persistence? Who justified this devotion to each other? I did. Only I can create in pairs of people the attraction that goes beyond reason or calculation.
What else accounts for this madness that spawns literature, music, science, exploration, commerce, and industry? Yes, I've inspired just about every Shakespearean sonnet, every Puccini opera, every Led Zeppelin hit.
I am the Taj Mahal. Overcome with grief when his third and favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal left this world as she gave him his 14th child, Shah Jahan poured his passion into her world-renown, white-marble tomb.
What was it he felt so compelled to replace? If you said, "love," you see only the surface. Love is but the clothes I wear.
Read all Seven Creative Juices: Pride, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Envy, Anger, and Sloth.
Right Brain Workouts Explained