Creating Brains

Creative, life-sustaining work brings a deep joy. It isn’t about will-power or relaxing or whim-following. It is about optimal experience and flow.  Every day for 8 days, I’m writing about the elements of flow. Yesterday I wrote about the Exclusion of Distractions from Consciousness.

Creative work is hard and challenging enough to be worth pursuing.  Sticking to the easy or automatic leads straight to boredom, stagnation and eventually decline.  Nothing new comes easily enough to be comfortable. Getting into the elusive state of flow in Creative work, takes a lot of work that feels like work. Physicist Freeman Dyson says

You have to describe it as a sort of struggle.  I have to always forced myself to write, and to also work harder on a science problem.  You have to put blood and sweat, and tears into it first.  And it is awfully hard to get started…You have to force yourself to push and push and push with the hope that something good will come out.  And you have to go through that process before it really starts to flow easily, and without that preliminary forcing and pushing probably nothing would ever happen.

Highly Creative people don’t wait to be in the mood to work.  They don’t wait to feel inspired.  They deliberately push onward. Nobel Laureate Marie Curie said,

I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.

But Creative progress isn’t too difficult either. Creativity researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says,

When the challenges become too great for the person to cope with, a sense of frustration rather than joy creeps in.

The joy of Creative work  lies between what you are capable of and the very new, hard and novel. Like a child trying to climb to the tippy-top of an ancient oak, you constantly reach for the next level.  You could fall, you could fail, but you keep moving forward. Walt Disney said,

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Csikszentmihalyi says,

When the challenges are just right, the creative process begins to hum.

That humming, that is flow.

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To read about the other elements of flow visit posts in the Creativity’s Nectar series individually:

1. Introduction to Flow
2. Clear Goals Every Step of the Way
3. Balance Between Challenges and Skills
4. Constant Feedback
5. Merging of Action and
   
6. Distractions are Excluded from Consciousness
7. Forgetting Time, Self and Surroundings
8. No Fear of Failure
9. Creativity becomes Autotelic

Or browse the entire series: Creativity’s Nectar: Flow.

Filed under: Creativity's Nectar: Flow | Tagged: Perspiration | 1 Comment »

Creative, life-sustaining work brings a deep joy. It isn’t about will-power or relaxing or whim-following. It is about optimal experience and flow.  Every day for 8 days, I’m writing about the elements of flow. Yesterday I wrote about the importance of Clear Goals and Feedback.

We finally got good lemons. Yesterday my husband mixed an awesome bowl of tabbouleh, a middle-Eastern parsley salad, perfectly chopped and seasoned with lemon juice, olive oil and sea salt; like belly-dancing for your taste buds. We had visiting guests, and every person with a bowl marveled in delight.  Mmmm.  Or, so I heard later. I was changing a diaper or searching for a missing bottle, or may be I was putting on fresh lipstick. Somehow, I wasn’t part of the collective tabbouleh experience.  Later, still hungry, I reached for the almost- empty bowl, scooped out two large spoonfuls of tabbouleh and ate them.  Just fueling myself.  My attention was elsewhere. No arias played in the background to enhance the experience, no belly-dancing for my taste buds. This morning, when my 10 yr. old commented on how good the tabbouleh had been I realized I vaguely remembered the elemental coarseness of the chopped parsley.

Being able to keep attention, to focus and concentrate on the task at hand is crucial to perspiring in flow, towards Creation.  Deep concentration is characteristic of Highly Creative people.  They may have been born with this tendency. They may have acquired it through osmosis or deliberate practice.  Either way, they can concentrate almost at will. For the rest of us, this state of sudden concentration at will is as variable as good hair.  Novelist Walter Mosley seems to understand,

Some of you live in tight spaces with loved ones.  Some of you work so hard that you can’t see straight half the time.  Some of you have little ones who might need your attention at any time of the day or night.  I wish I had the answers to these problems.  I don’t.

But, Mosley says, the way to focus deeply is to practice your Creative task, to work on it everyday.  Albert Einstein said,

It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Although Mosley sits down at the computer but three hours a day.  He’s thinking about his story or subconsciously mulling over it almost all day long.  He says,

The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity.  What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind).  The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. The way to get to this unconscious place is by writing every day.  Or not even writing.  Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting scrolling back and forth through the text.  This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.

The novelist’s dream of a story, the physicist’s over-thinking of Time, the inventors constant tinkering, all illustrate the deep concentration Creative work requires, and proves mental space is claimed through time.  The more time spent on a task, eventually it can take over the precious real estate that is your brain.

Back to the tabbouleh bowl, I’m a little sorry I missed the sensual mini-party it ignited.  I don’t remember what  I was doing at the moment, but I do remember what I was thinking.  I was thinking about Creativity and wondering whether my brother-in-law’s conviction that Creativity cannot be taught, could possibly be true.  This is something great to think about if you’re working on your own Creative terrain, as I am.  So, my focus was right on that time.

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To read about the other elements of flow visit posts in the Creativity’s Nectar series individually:

1. Introduction to Flow
2. Clear Goals Every Step of the Way
3. Balance Between Challenges and Skills
4. Constant Feedback
5. Merging of Action and
   
6. Distractions are Excluded from Consciousness
7. Forgetting Time, Self and Surroundings
8. No Fear of Failure
9. Creativity becomes Autotelic

Or browse the entire series: Creativity’s Nectar: Flow.

Filed under: Creativity's Nectar: Flow | Tagged: Perspiration | Leave a Comment »