Dammed Creativity

Posted on March 14, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Benjamin Franklin had little free time in his old age.  He complained of this cram-packed-with-politics schedule to close friends.  The very new United States– still fighting to survive needed his diplomacy, wit, wisdom and time.  And nobody else could fill his shoes. His science experiments lay unfinished collecting dust in his backyard laboratory.  Like some homeowners in my neighborhood are house poor–  great salaries funneled straight to paying the mortgage and fixing up the house,  Benjamin Franklin was energy poor. State-building sucked every last bit of Franklin’s remarkable energy–  and he felt his soul shrink.

A few days ago, my eight-year-old son asked us all at breakfast, What is the worse possible thing you can imagine happening? I immediately thought of losing my child to scurvy or a car accident.  But my six-year-old daughter said,  Oh.  I think living your entire life and never having done what you were meant to do–  without doing what you love. That would be terrible.

My daughter is right on.  I’m so glad she can say this out loud without a second thought.

But how could you die without ever reaching your potential?  For Franklin a new nation claimed his time, thus suppressing his exuberant creative pursuit.  But energy-claimers are most often historic only in your wildest dreams– masses of urgent incoming e-mails, houses to build, fortunes to lay out for the future. You could die without ever cracking your creative potential by failing to ever decide to start.  You could give up attending to your dreams when the phone starts ringing or when your wife complains about the yard.  If you must choose between keeping bargains you never made or owning your energy and creative potential– well, I think you can guess what I’d say.

Having a choice at all, is a privilege.  If you have no food, many sick children, a husband who beats you, no shelter and no work in sight,  your choices are much, much smaller.  But my guess is,  if you have time enough to read these words– you have at least some (education, time, money, space) options for creation.  The French philosopher Ernest Renan said,

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Ignored creativity–  no matter how plentiful or unruly at the start or how honorable the competition, dries up. And once you decide you’ve got to create come hail or high water, what you do with the truths you know–  that is what makes you Creative or not.

 

 

 

 

How about you?  Is your creativity still dammed up inside you?

Filed under: Choices, Creativity Killer, Making Time, Mistakes, Philosophers, The Child, The Scientist, Truth | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Born After 1088?

Posted on February 20, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Next to buying a new bookshelf, tackling a messy topic with white gloves is the joy of  historians. Medieval prostitution in France? Been there. Hitler’s willing executioners?  Done that.  No.  Not been or done.  Read.  Still, some characters of long ago haunt my dreams at night.

I once sat in on John Taylor Gatto’s talk, Is College Necessary? The gist:  Nope.  You don’t need college to be rich (ask Bill Gates), famous (ask Jullian Assange), creative (ask James Cameron) or funny (ask Ellen Degeneres). John Taylor Gatto is engaging and I throughly enjoyed myself, detached and free to weigh his ideas objectively, like an historian.  And up until just last month, if you asked me if college is necessary for creativity or anything else, I may have said, Not really.  But I wouldn’t say the same today. Instead, I’d tell you, Heck yeah!  Go to college. Well, at least that’s what I want to tell my young friend who’s just dropped out to start a business.

Why not come clean with my friend and discuss things objectively, like an historian?   I can’t.  I’m too subjectively invested in this kid. He’s bright, creative, even philosophical and would totally thrive in the right college.  True, Plato never went to college.  Nor did Copernicus, Jesus Christ or Vitruvious.  But they couldn’t because no university existed until 1088.

Granted, not all universities are equal.  Some are universities only in name.  But the best, regardless of name or fame, give students the tool of past wisdom to push to new light and opportunities to dwell on the adjacent possible–  new ideas, new inventions, new scientific findings, better theories of, well, everything.  And like High Creativity on the scale of Copernicus or Toni Morrison, a rockin’ university education is philosophically based.  The only good reason to willingly by-pass this chance to push yourself mentally is timing.  If Bill Gates had stayed at Harvard to pass his physics finals instead of dropping out to work 20 hours a day tinkering and programming, history would have played out differently ( worse?) for us all.

Maybe I’ll ask my friend the following question:

Is your entrepreneurial passion so timely it can’t wait-out a rockin’ university education?

If he says, Yes! I’ll have to say, All right then,  quit college and get to work in your garage, baby. But, if he can’t answer yes,  then I’ll take my white gloves off and beg him to return ASAP because there are many, many more Highly Creative people who have been to college (at least ever since 1088) than have not.


Filed under: advice and expectations, Choices, Expectations, Philosophers | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Nature is Leaden to Me–But I Figured Out Why

Posted on January 25, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

My previous post was a challenge.  I spent the better part of an afternoon sorting through random, uninteresting thoughts for a single exciting idea.  The children were around and as quirky as usual. I had plenty of time to write while they played with friends. Loads of books surrounded me. Still–I came up empty.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Although Emerson makes it seem like you have either a dull mind or an illuminated mind, most people experience both extremes in different ratios. All humans are dull–sometimes. But a key to Creativity is to be illuminated and excited by the world more of the time.

Recently, I’ve been reading Laura Vanderkam’s highly practical book–168 Hours:  You Have More Time Than You Think. She thinks planning days in 24-hour-blocks limits your creative accomplishments. Instead, she recommends looking at time as week-long blocks. She says,

The way I see it, anything you do once a week happens often enough to be important to you, whether it’s church, a strategic thinking session at work, you Sunday dinner with your parents, or your softball team practice.  The weekly 168-hour cycle is big enough to give a true picture of our lives.  Years and decades are made up of a mosaic of repeating patterns of 168 hours.  Yet there is room for randomness, and the mosaic will evolve over time, but whether you pay attention to the pattern is still a choice.  Largely, the true picture of our lives will be a function of how we set the tiles.

The poet Robert Louis Stevenson planned his schedule by weeks.  He said,

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Your Creative energy often depends on your schedule–what gets a piece of your life and what does not. A huge part of creative accomplishment is simply getting your work done.To lose weight, you look at what you are eating and plan your meals to achieve the desired outcome–a slimmer you.  Looking at your schedule by the week functions like a food diary to show you what to cut and what you must keep in.

Schedules cannot be commoditized.  What fuels your Creativity or shuts it down is personal. Nobel Laureate for Peace Elise Weisel reads, travels and writes. But he won’t stop by the Louvre if he’s in Paris .  He says,

What is being lost is the magic of the word.  I am not an image person.  Imagery belongs to another civilization:  the caveman.  Caveman couldn’t express himself so he put images on walls.

But the philosopher Albert Camus saw things differently. He said,

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

The point is– images stayed out of Weisel’s schedule because they dulled his Creative appetite.

Yesterday, when I realized how slow my mind moved, I looked at my previous 168 hours and immediately found what was going down. Every day, the past week,  I made time for coffee. On the day I had trouble waking to the world and posting on this blog–I did not.   And, having spent most of the previous night talking, not sleeping– the effects of skipping coffee were blaring. Could a simple cup of coffee make my world burn and sparkle with light?

Writer Martha Beck says,

Almost all my middle-aged and elderly acquaintances, including me, feel about 25, unless we haven’t had our coffee, in which case we feel 107.

But the point  isn’t to feel young.  It’s to add sparkle and light to your world–so you can do what you love, well.  I like what the highly Creative mathematician Paul Erdös said best.  He said,

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

This morning–I won’t forget my coffee.

 

Filed under: Brain Care, Choices, Passion, The Writer | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Constraints that Increase Creativity, Part 1: The Truth about Time

Posted on October 8, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

For five days I’m writing about constraints that serve as kindling for Creation. Yesterday I introduced the topic of Constraints.

I once sat to the left of a Literature professor at a colloquia round table. She dressed in olive-green and gray, adjusted her smart glasses every few minutes and wore her dark hair short. To my right a round, doughy woman with a slight tan shook her head slowly, opened both her hands and said, I just haven’t had time to review today’s topic. She sighed. I’m just a bit overwhelmed, I have so much to do .

The Literature professor nodded her head. She spoke with a thick Eastern European accent,

Yes, I know sometimes it is very hard to garner energy to read something that seems irrelevant to every day life.

When the communists controlled Bulgaria, I was assigned to work in a factory.  My job was to screw one type of screw onto one section of thousands of refrigerator backs, all day.  I had to do this over and over and fast to keep the production line moving quickly. I started work at 7 a.m. and arrived at home at 9 p.m.  I did not read a single page of Literature those years.

I wasn’t really alive.

The doughy woman sat quietly like a scolded five-year old but nodded her head in  faux-commiseration.   The Literature professor’s truth exposed the doughy woman’s lie of being overwhelmed. She also pointed out a larger truth that eludes many creative types: when someone else controls the minute details of your time,  you aren’t really alive and you won’t Create.

Journalist Laura Vanderkam says,

Being busy has become the explanation of choice for all sorts of things…

But here’s the crazy thing. [Highly Creative persons]–and the people who claim they’re ‘too busy’ to vote, or have only 12 minutes to talk to their spouses,  all have the same exact amount of time.  All of us.  We have 24 hours in our days, and 7 days in our weeks. If you do the math that comes out to 168 hours each week to create the life we want.

You may be reading this post from a jail cell in Nigeria or on a laptop precariously placed on top of unfolded laundry in New Jersey.  Your little children may be climbing all over you all day long  because you home-school or you may be sitting in an office cubicle looking busy and avoiding your gnarly boss. If you can think, Time is yours.

Vanderkam says,

What if we approached time differently?  What if we started with a blank slate? What if we viewed every minute…as a choice?

Writer Maria Housden barely made it up the stairs awake at bedtime when her four children were small.  Her  husband did not understand her need to Create and questioned any time she spent writing. So she stopped writing.

One day, Housden left her children with her sister for a summer break.  Then she rented a tiny cabin in the woods and slept.  Eventually, she gathered her thoughts, took back time as her birthright and wrote.  Two weeks later, when she came back to family life, she couldn’t stop writing.  But, she also realized she wasn’t the mother she had always hoped she’d be or the wife her husband wanted.  So Housden left.  She left her children with her husband and an energetic nanny and lived on her own.  She faced the truth about her time and built her life for Creation.

Vanderkam says,

I will not pretend this is easy.  In order to get more out of their 168 hours, some people have had to change jobs, move, or otherwise create turmoil in the middle of already full lives.

If you believe you are too busy to Create,  you are lying to yourself.  And if you tell others you are so busy and overwhelmed,  you are lying to them.  The truth is that you have not organized your life for Creation.  Constraining yourself to the truth about time will free up energy formally used for excuses and you can move on to actually pursue the Creative Life.

Filed under: Choices, Constraints, Making Time | Tagged: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Time Theory at the Dentist

Posted on July 1, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

New headphones on, I settled happily in my pilot-chair to let Dr. Dentist work in peace.  I too, would be at peace, listening to Sean Carroll‘s mind-altering  From Eternity to Here .  Janet, the assistant,  bustled about selecting tools.  I’m ready, I said to her.  I’ve got a great book to listen to!

She stopped.  Oh really? She smiled wide.  What book is it?

It’s a physics book,  I said.  Theoretical physics, about…

She scrunched her face.

…It’s about Time, I finished.

Ooooh that doesn’t sound like much fun.  Too bad you don’t have something fun to listen to, she said and left.

Any theoretical physicist would pity her lack of excitement for Time, but only a teeny-tiny percentage of people in my home town could muster excitement for a pop-physics book.  Janet’s attitudes are common here.

Creativity researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says,

Hunting, fishing, eating, and mating have privileged places in our nervous system. It is much more difficult to learn to enjoy doing things that were discovered recently in our evolution, like manipulating symbolic systems by doing math or science or writing poetry or music.

Maybe.

But some children, when provided the right tools, compose primitive tunes, play with numbers or write stories for fun.

Two weeks before my first child’s birth, her jungle-theme room was cram-packed with interesting children’s books. Both my husband and I love to read, so we readied for her arrival by surrounding her with things we love.  By her first birthday, she too loved books.  By her fifth birthday, she wanted to write them.  Stacks of blank paper and cups full of pencils and pens were scattered around the house for her to find.  She did and she wrote.  A teacher friend of mine worried for her. She said,

She needs to play more, Joana.

But to my little girl, writing was play.  Her poems and plays and newspaper articles brought her joy and filled her days with meaning.

Plato wrote that the most important task for a society was to teach the young to find pleasure in the right objects. For us the right objects were books.

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Keeping Track of Attention: Part 3

Posted on June 28, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

This weekend I carried a small, moleskin notebook around to keep track of my attention.  A day into this I knew my system would bring no epiphanies.  My attention had no trouble remaining where directed as I spent time with my sister and her family.  My 16 yr. old niece happily held my three-month old and dressed my two-year old. My sister painted toenails and watered the garden with my six-year old.  I Listened to Copland and Rachel Portman on my nephew’s hi-fidelity get up and ate gourmet food artfully arranged on large white-china plates.   Attention is easy when novelty, love and rest converge.

The senses lure you out of your head. Winifred Gallegher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life says:

To function in the external world of the senses, you often don’t need to spend much energy on directing your attention.

Following your attention this way is energizing for Creative work.  But, attention is also easy when danger threatens.  I almost choked on a white bean skin over lunch on Saturday and packed my children to spend Sunday night at my brother’s house because smokey-wildfire air filled the canyon we call home.  Attention held firm then too. Fortunately all is well, the threats stayed as such.

So, maybe this wasn’t such a good weekend to discover cliches in my mental processes.  Still, my moleskin is newly packed with fresh ideas. I think I’ll continue to jot down random, interesting thoughts for future use.

I did pay attention about attention and how terribly important it is to well-being and Creative capacity.  I will be thinking about it more and writing about it in the near future .

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An Inspiring Life and Attitude: Dr. Randy Pausch

Posted on June 27, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Dr. Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (watch it below)  is inspiring in many ways.  What I love most is the authenticity and wonder  Dr. Pausch projects.

Albert Einstein said,

There are two ways to live your life – one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

So many times attitude makes all the difference, even in the face of illness and death.

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Creativity and The Amish

Posted on June 9, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

I remember all the green.  The hills fresh-soaked with drizzle, gently sliced along their bases by a winding black top. One lone sober horse pulling a black buggy.  Clip-clop….Clip, clop. I visited Pennsylvania’s Amish Country the Spring after I turned twelve.  I loved the  look of the “plain sect” community .  Everything proportional, almost stylized, very beautiful, but certainly unreal. Like stepping into a movie, except I could smell the manure. Turns out the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could also. In today’s New York Times Sindya Bhanoo writes

Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay…The farmers have a choice:  change the way they farm or face penalties…they own more than 50 percent of Lancaster County’s 5,000 plus farms.

A Bible-based, orally transmitted code of behavior supplies the rules that keep life simple for the Amish. That code, also separates them from the rest of the world. Their life may come across as idyllic, but Creativity, as I use the word for this blog, is almost non-existent.

I use Creativity as explained by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly as the working definition for this project.  Csikszentmihaly says:

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one.

And,

The definition of a creative person is:  someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain…a domain cannot be changed without explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.

The Amish quietly celebrate the changing of the seasons and embrace individual biological cycles of change such as menarche.  But the Amish cannot be Creative because Amish culture actively resists change.

Fundamentalism, whether religious, cultural or philosophical is oxymoronic to transformation, to Creation.

Creativity Scholar, Norman Holland writes:

People who obey any dogma, [researchers] say, may be relying on on the phylogenetically older, more posterior portions of the brain that store knowledge and enable consistent or stable behaviors and neglecting the more evolved frontal regions that embody our capacity for divergent, that is, creative thinking or, at least, the Eureka! moments of creativity.  People with frontal lobe damage score lower on tests of divergent thinking, and conversely individuals who produced the most creative responses on tests had more frontal lobe activation.

Holland quotes an Israeli study:

Based on what we know about brain growth, it is possible that a child taught only to follow, and not to personally wonder about or question doctrine, will suffer from an abnormal development of the frontal lobes.

This does not mean rules are antithetical to Creativity.  A Creator will know the rules of her domain even better than less Creative colleagues.  Her originality rooted in those rules makes her Creative. Rules are parameters of Creativity, but never not a lid.

Note: Thanks to my good friend Tiffany for directing me to Robert Genn’s letter & Holland’s  2009 article “Can Fundamentalists be Creative?“

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So Life Goes On

Posted on May 22, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

The weight of her entire life barely filled the hands rushing her from womb to resuscitation.

Valentina entered the world quietly. In another place or decade, a time of death would have been recorded on a quotidian chart.  Not so on this unusually cool March afternoon at  UCSD Med Center in San Diego. Whispered physicians’ orders punctuated the twilight aura. Moments hung like ocean fog.

I’m not sure when my tiny girl cried or if she did at all that first day of life.  But some time she took a deep, intubated  breath and thrust herself to life. With every hard-won heave, each cell in her dark, brown-red body joined the whole to live one more second.  Her deep, hard fight held me in wonder, in fear;  “What’s pushing this little creature to live? “  Born 10 weeks too soon due to serious maternal/ fetal blood incompatibility issues, she barely looked human. Yet, Life itself;  the Universe in its immensity and mystery seemed to converge its power on this, my child, to keep her from dissipating into a memory.

Writer Adam Gopnick, on the birth of his daughter Olivia said:

You hear the nurse cooing …and feel useless… and, at the same time, somehow serenely powerful, beyond care or criticism, since you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.

I had done my part.  I am forever grateful to the tens of nurses, doctors, therapists and cuddlers at UCSD who cared for my Valentina as if her life meant everything. I thank them for choosing to continue life.

And, I want to thank Valentina, for living.

Post Note: Valentina came home seven weeks later and is gaining weight, which makes me supremely happy.

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