Definition of Dynamics

What is Dynamic?

As a basic quality of reality, everything is in motion. Nothing is static. This dynamism is one that always also involves novelty. Things are in motion and change. The new and the different are always coming into being. Things are always in the making—always being created. The dynamics of creativity—of the ongoing making of reality—are everywhere and everywhere in becoming. We often recognize things as unchanging and no longer in the making, but this is a type of illusion. And it is a perspective that fundamentally alienates us from creation and creativity. Creation and creativity are not discreet practices that have clear beginnings and ends. Things are not created, and then they just exist. No, rather—all things are “in the making.”

Creativity does not begin with the human or in ideas—it is a basic quality of our dynamic reality. Our human creativity begins in sensing the ongoing dynamics of reality in the making. “Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature” (A. N. Whitehead).

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That reality is dynamic does not mean that everything simply moves and changes in the same manner. To speak of dynamism is to recognize differing speeds and slownesses. And it is to recognize that what is in motion are processes. Everything is process—fields and processes. What we take as fixed things—my body and this keyboard—are processes—processes in and on processes. 

Stability is the temporary dynamic state of one phase of an adaptive system that ultimately has multiple stable states. Feedback loops will creatively tip the system into another state. The set of these linked states or phases produces a type of meta-stable condition. And these larger meta-stable states are themselves products of histories and will also transform. 

Creativity is creation in the never-ending dynamics of every moment of reality—nothing is given—just there—everything is in the ongoing process of making.

See: Process, Creativity, Meta-Stability, Complex Adaptive Systems