Creativity’s Terrain, Part 14: Clutter Your Life with Truth and Love Beauty

Posted on September 4, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. This is the final post in this series about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Finding Friends that Challenge.

You can’t buy land to build a dream home or build self-storage units on Papua New Guinea, a small island nation off the coast of Australia. Land simply isn’t for sale, at any price. It is 97% owed collectively by aboriginal tribes, the rest is unusable.

I sauntered through an open air market, years ago, in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea.  Stopping in front of two women selling sweet potatoes, I noticed three small girls giggling around me. The littlest one caught my eye.  Her eyes sparkled and raising her eyebrows, she pointed at my curly hair. She wanted to touch my hair.

I don’t think evolutionary sociologist, Alan S. Miller, who wrote  Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, has been to Mount Hagen.  He says,

Women’s desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

Not only are women in Papua New Guinea not large-breasted, blond or blue-eyed, in some regions they look much like their husbands, with mustaches and strong muscles to boot. Over and over, the one overt physical difference this Westerner could spot between men and women was a skirt, worn by the woman. Yet, New Guinean women mate and love,  just the same.

Albert Einstein said,

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

I know Miller’s ideas are wrong because I’ve walked the dusty paths of New Guinea.  Miss Piggy, of Muppet’s fame, says,

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

Highly Creative people know Truth.

Truth isn’t doled out in bit and pieces, by genetics, small experiments or even great teachers. The truths that feed Creation are intuitive.  And intuition grows by wide-eyed observation and with experience.

Einstein said,

There are two ways to live, you can live as if nothing is a miracle, you can live as if everything is a miracle.

Creators use truth they know to catch patterns and discover the beautiful in human existence.  Beauty, like sunshine for a plant, compels Creation to grow tall, to try to meet it. The deeper the roots of truth, the higher the Creation.

Fill your life with experience, your own and that of other humans. Clutter your life with truth and grow towards the truly beautiful.

Create.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 13: Seek Friends That Challenge

Posted on September 3, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Intellectual Discomfort.

Evenings our family often gathers in what we call the Music room, to read. A well-loved baby grand piano dominates the decor, but hundreds of books spill out of stuffed shelves, almost begging to be handled. My 2 yr. old takes heed. She picks books out as if she were choosing a new best friend, with much pondering. The rest of us, each take over a couch or chair or portion of rug and, read.

A few months ago, my 11 yr. old daughter’s best friend (also 11) spent a week with us and happily joined our reading time ritual.

The boy is a reading snob.  He reads like a New York Times Book Review critic, fast and a little bit angry.  One evening, he looked up from a story he’d been fighting with and noticed my daughter reading calmly.  Slowly.  Her hands both held her book, her face showed no trace of anxious anticipation for the next page.

The next morning, my daughter wanted to talk to me about what he had told her after. She said,

Mom?  J. told me I read meticulously. He said I must linger over the pages so long because I’m delighting in the writing itself, not just looking for the story.

I let her explain.

I think he was telling me I read slow.

I mean, I do!  Compared to him!

Since the boy’s gentle reprimand she reads differently.  She too, now argues with her books.  Nobel laureate molecular biologist, of DNA structure fame, James D. Watson says,

Never be the brightest person in the room.  Getting out of intellectual ruts more often than not requires unexpected intellectual jousts. Nothing can replace the company of others who have the background to catch errors in your reasoning or provide facts that either prove or disprove your argument of the moment.  And the sharper those around you, the sharper you will become.

Highly Creative people need intellectual equals as friends. Novelist Isabel Allende says,

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

When you think you know, when you feel ultra- Creative, that is when you need a friend to set you straight. You need at least one friend who does not coddle you, because in Creation, the truth does really set you free.  Ancient Roman historian Plutarch said,

I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

But Highly Creative people, male or female, often seek friends that nurture in conventional ways. Again James Watson says,

It’s contrary to human nature, and especially male nature, but being the top dog in the pack can work against your greater accomplishments.  Much better to be the least accomplished chemist in a super chemistry department than the superstar in a less lustrous department.

For Creativity’s sake, true friends keep you on your toes, because like you, they know that to grow is to live and Create. Irish writer Oscar Wilde said,

True friends stab you in the front.

Seek friends that challenge, hopefully with tack, but be ready to be stabbed in the front.


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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 12: Think Uncomfortable Thoughts

Posted on September 2, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Finding Mentors.

Student seating at Stanford University’s dSchool is uncomfortable.  The stools sit a little high for the average Joe and seem to push you off at the slightest wiggle. But nobody complains. The seats are designed to remind students to remain intellectually uncomfortable.

Writer Susan Sontag lived in a tiny room on a small cot to stimulate her intellectual discomfort. Sontag said,

I’m writing this is Paris, in a room about 4′ by 10′, sitting on a wicker chair at a typing table in front of a window…

That I have been living and working for more than a year in such small bare quarters…undoubtedly answers to some need to strip down while finding a new space inside my head.

Acetic self-incarceration or ill-fitting stools only point to a broader truth of Creation; unchecked comfort, specially intellectual comfort, paves the road to Creative perdition.

Creative environments may improve with a little physical discomfort but cannot exist without intellectual discomfort.

Radio talk show host Denis Prager says constant attention to what is missing in your life leads to unhappiness. Its like looking up at an exquisite mosaic ceiling in a house of worship and noticing the one tiny missing tile.

Prager is right in that self-absorption leads to unhappiness. But, spotting that missing tile could spawn the invention of glue strong enough to withstand centuries of barometric pressure changes.

Creativity builds on the incongruous, the uncomfortable.

Nobel laureate Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini when recently asked about her age (she’s over 100 years old) said,

My sight and my hearing aren’t as good, but the brain is fine. I believe I have a higher mental capacity today than I had when I was younger, with all the experience I have lived.

I’m trying to forget about [my upcoming birthday]. It just happened that I was born [more than] 100 years ago, merit had nothing to do with it.  The secret of life is to keep thinking.  And to stop thinking about ourselves. That’s the only message I have.

So, the road to long life is thinking. And thinking for Creation requires some discomfort.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 11: Place Yourself Well and Let Someone Point the Way

Posted on August 30, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Finding a Love and Attending to it for Life.

Highly Creative people need inspiration and a light on their path.

When Elizabeth Blackwell (first American woman to earn an MD) graduated from medical school in 1949, she had no place to intern or clinic to practice what she’d learned. Her adviser directed her to Paris, France to intern at La Maternité. She had to continue her training as a student midwife, not a physician.

Blackwell’s father educated all his children, girls and boys, alike and inspired her to love learning.  He died young, and although Blackwell had work as a teacher for many years to save money for medical school, she boarded with a physician’s family. There she spent free time reading medical texts and asking  hard questions at the dinner table.

In her turn, Blackwell inspired many women into medicine.  Today, 51% of medical students are female.

Recently, I sat next to Urologist Monisha Crisell at a dinner party.  I asked her if she liked her work, she said she loved it.  Intrigued that this classy-looking physician would have specialized on the male reproductive system, in the first place and continues to find meaning in helping men with erectile disjunction and kidney stones, performing vasectomies and treating prostate cancers, I said,

What made you decide to go into Urology?

She said,

I like urologists. They’re easy-going and funny.  Nice to work with.

She did say she liked the patients, as well.  But, the reason she’s a Urologist today is, urologists inspired her as a medical student.

Elizabeth Blackwell would have smiled knowing in the future, women in medicine would have such opportunities. But it is the work of Marie Zakrzewska (whom Blackwell mentored) that actually paved the way for Dr. Crisell to choose a specialty she enjoyed, rather than be limited to obstetrics.

In 1862, Marie Zakrzewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children and opened clinical training for female physicians to specialties beyond obstetrics.

Zakrzewska’s veterinarian grandmother and midwife mother took her along for house calls throughout her childhood. She watched cows labor and women deliver their children.  She trained as a midwife in her native Germany, at a time when professionally trained midwives were male. When she emigrated to the United States, a few years later, she found little support for a  woman in medicine, here as well. Elizabeth Blackwell encouraged her on to medical school. But, even as a physician, Zakrzewska struggled for respect and found no work.

Blackwell and her sister Emily (also a doctor) recruited Zakrzewska as the first resident physician for the hospital they founded, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

Creativity thrives on mentor-ship.  Mentors point to the right path and encourage would-be Creators, but they need not be Highly Creative themselves.

American poet, Maya Angelou’s mentor was her fourth grade teacher, not a poet herself, but she saw a spark in the little girl and knew where to direct her.  Angelou says,

Mrs. Flowers took me to the library in the black school.  The library was probably as large as a telephone booth.  It may have had 110 books in it, maybe.  She said, ‘I want you to read every book in this room.’

And I found poetry.

I consider that a lifeline, because finally, when I was about 12 and a half, almost 13, Mrs. Flowers–who would allow me to come to her house and she would read to me– she said, you will never really love poetry until you speak it, feel it across your tongue, over your lips.

Not every Highly Creative person has the same mentor, lifelong.  But placing yourself where a caring someone might direct you to the next step is crucial to creative development.


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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 10: Find A Love & Attend to It, For Life

Posted on August 29, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Setting Your Own Path.

Creativity in a given domain builds on pleasure but  is sustained, just like the best of relationships, with lifelong attention.

A few months ago, my son and I happened to walk past the Lego isle at a toy shop. We didn’t stop, but his eyes skipped a blink.

Cognitive psychologists measure a baby’s interest in or recognition of objects by split second differences in attention. A baby will look at an object that captures her interest a tiny bit longer. I registered my son’s pause and knew what I’d buy for his next birthday.

He’s crazy-infatuated now. Four hours a day using Lego’s Design by Me site is not enough.  He eats, sleeps and swims when I insist he must take a break.  The rest of his day is spent as follows:

  • building Legos
  • talking his sisters (at home) and cousins (by phone) into buying Legos
  • begging to help me with unsavory (paid) chores, so he can buy Legos
  • trying to figure out how to work as a Lego designer, by the time he turns 13 (he’s willing to move to Denmark)

He may not remain monogamous for long in this relationship with Legos.  His first child may, or may not, be born in Bullund, Denmark. Regardless, working long hours with Legos will serve a more enduring, future Creative pursuit by fortifying, among other things, problem-solving and three-dimensional design skills. And he will love Legos into old age for the joy he feels today.

Love for a domain need not reach full-blast, at first sight.  In fact, it will need 10,000 hours of devoted attention to allow for Creativity.

My 11 yr. old daughter spent the big bucks, this morning, on acrylic paint tubes.  She’s been painting all afternoon and left her room for dinner, amazed two hours had passed since she last left the easel. Up-sweeping her brow, she  said,

Wow. I can see how artists get so involved in their work.

This overt love of painting is new but an interest has simmered in her subconscious for years. Now, with her recent 45 hours of art lessons squeezed into three weeks, she’s hooked.  She’s learned who Mary Cassatt was and how hard Claude Monet fought for respect and relates, even if only a bit.

Her sweet infatuation may grow tall and wide to lead her to Art School later or, it may ripple into a different domain for her as well.

My most vivid memories of childhood recall the amazing (to me), cosmological questions I pondered back then. I’ve spent happy hours drawing and reading and running marathons. I’m crazy about my children and married my soul mate. But like Rene Descartes,

I think, therefore Iam.

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, is a zoologist, financier and journalist. He travels and hikes and dabbles in philanthropy.  But is true love seems philosophy.  He thinks about the origins of Man and what makes us who, and what, we are. He married a neuroscientist. His training and his relationships, fuel his passion for thinking.

Young Albert Einstein‘s stint clerking in the Swiss Patent office, also fueled his thinking passion.  He reviewed patents on clocks (which in his day were not atomic-time accurate) and pondered on the enigma of time.

Even the patron saint of polymaths, Leonardo Da Vinci, had one huge idea to drive all his projects.  His was a lifelong love for the human eye. This awe for the human capacity to see drove his every invention and every work of art.

Highly Creative people eventually stop flitting domain to domain to devote themselves to the one domain they’ll love lifelong. They dream within one domain and love it, as long as life.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 9: Setting Your Own Path

Posted on August 26, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Following Childhood Dreams .

Right in the middle of my life,  I realized that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was like I’d wandered off the right path into a very, very bad neighborhood. I don’t even want to remember how scary that place was–makes me feel like I’m going to die or something. I’m only telling you about it because a lot of good came out of it in the long run…I felt like I’d been sleepwalking.– Dante Aligheri, 1307 (as translated by Martha Beck)

Sooner or later, Highly Creative people say no to paths set by others and choose their own.

Poet Robert Frost knew this. He said,

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

The luckiest people drop-off expectations set for them, not by them, sooner. They recognize a bad neighborhood when they first see it.

Nobel laureate Neurologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini (now over a century old), recalls deciding at a very young age, to never marry.  She describes her early family life as very happy,  and her father as loving and respectful of women. But still, she felt her mother was “dominated”.

I decided I would never marry and I kept my word. I did not want to be ‘in second place’ like my mother, whom I adored. I told my father I did not intend to be just a wife and mother. I didn’t know I wanted to be a scientist then, I didn’t know what science was, but I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others.

Mahatma Ghandi‘s parents wished him to become a barrister, a lawyer.  At the time, he could not see the benefit of this path. He respected their opinion enough to pursue law but,  he did so his way. At 19, against his parent’s wishes and aware he would be ostracized in his native Porbandar, Gandhi headed to London, a non-Hindu, forbidden place, to study law at University College London.

The big “No”, may come with ease or may need ardent fighting-for, but it must come for Creativity to bloom.  As Gandhi said,

A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.


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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 8: Childhood Dreams Lead to Creativity

Posted on August 25, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Writing.

Pregnant Mary Duncan tolerated only iced oysters and iced champagne the summer before Isadora’s birth.  Her daughter Isadora Duncan, mother of Modern Dance, said,

If people would ask me when I began to dance I reply, ‘In my mother’s womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne–the food of Aphrodite.’

Isadora knew in her deepest core she would dance, always.  But by age 7 she despised ballet and classic dances. She says,

The dominant note of my childhood was the constant spirit of revolt against the narrowness of the society in which we lived, against the limitations of life and a growing desire to fly [to] something I imagined might be broader.

A voracious reader, at 18, Isadora got a first chance to dance her way by convincing a prominent 1895 New York theater manager she would create a dance expressing America, for children. She said to him,

I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman…  I bring to your theater the vital sound that it lacks, the soul of the dancer.  For, you know,”

The man said,

That’s quite enough!

But she marched on,

The birth of the theater was the dance, and the first actor was the dancer…and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theater, your theater will not live in its truest expression!

She got a part in a pantomime.

Many years later, a 4th grader and future Professor, Randy Pausch, made the following list of things he wanted to achieve:

Being in zero gravity

Playing in the NFL

Authoring an article in the World Book encyclopedia

Being Captain Kirk

Winning Stuffed animals

Being a Disney Imagineer

In his famous Last Lecture, Pausch tells how he achieved his childhood dream list.

The father of Creativity scholarship, E. Paul Torrance, found children, with clear ideas of what they loved to do and  happy dreams of what they wanted to become, turned out to live rich Creative lives. Torrance said,

As a matter of fact, this indicator (having or not having a future image that they were in love with) was a better predictor of adult creative achievement than indexes of scholastic promise and attainment in school.

Not every child is so perspicacious regarding her future.

Writer Willa Cather reclaimed her Creativity when, as a grown woman, she stopped admiring and started remembering.

Within your childhood joys and dabbles is the seed of your Creative truth.

Remember.


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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 7: Write to Express Ideas & Find Your Place in the World

Posted on August 24, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about the value of Reading, a lot.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin

Highly Creative people write.

Martha Graham, mother of Contemporary Dance, wrote draft, after draft, late into a thousand nights to translate her ideas into human movement. Graham said,

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer’s body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

Architect Christopher Alexander wrote many books, including The Order of Nature series, to empower future designers, both professional and amateur, to create work inspired by true human needs.

Nobel laureate Neurologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini published dozens of scholarly articles detailing her discovery of human Nerve Growth Factor, as well as In Praise of Imperfection, her autobiography.

Across domains, Highly Creative people communicate their ideas through the written word. They also write to understand their own ideas. Playwright, Joan Didion says,

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.

American writer, Ernest Hemingway said,

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Creator and mentor to Artists across disciplines, Julia Cameron, recommends keeping a large notepad and paper by your bed to write as soon as you wake up, everyday.  She says,

In order to find our creativity–or for that matter, our spirituality–we must begin where we are.

Cameron recommends using writing as a compass. She says,

The tool that best helps us find our spiritual bearings is called Morning Pages…

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand stream of consciousness that locate us precisely in the here and now.  They are written first thing upon awakening and they tell us–and the Universe–what we like, what we don’t like, what we wish we had more of, and what we wish we had less of, and what we wish, period.

So, write to find where you are and what you need to be Creative. And write to explain yourself and your ideas to the world.  But, write.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 6: Read, alot.

Posted on August 23, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about the Value of Solitude for Children.

My car swerved, ever-so-slightly, towards The Neurosciences Institute as I drove by this morning. I’d love to chat with Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman about how consciousness really works.  But my race car’s full of children and we’re headed to art classes.  I may not get to speak to Dr.Edelman today, or in the foreseeable future. But I can read his books and mix my own memories and ideas with his.

Eighteenth-Century philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau said,

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

That is precisely why books foster Creativity. A book gives unlimited access to the mind of another.

Rousseau was right in that, when you read, you learn to talk of things you could not have in the past. But he was also wrong, because when you read, you learn. Another French philosopher, Ernest Renan had it right. He said,

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

Highly Creative people revel in ideas.  Read and read some more, because books are the bed on which ideas mate.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 5: For Children, Protected Solitude and One Tool

Posted on August 22, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about The Importance of Solitude.

Some children tend to play alone happily, naturally.  Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung called such children introverts.

For extroverted children, the more, the merrier, is the rule.  But, regardless of whether a child loves crowds or hangs out more often alone, Creative development requires solitude.

You can protect a child’s time to provide the requisite solitude.
I recently chatted about Creative development in childhood, with my friend, the French novelist Natashka Moreau. She says,

I was trying to figure out what it is that most triggered (or maybe not ‘triggered’ as much as ‘allowed to flow’) my curiosity and creativity. It is that my parents left me alone, quite a bit, when I was young.  Although, I think they did that because they saw I was never bored on my own.  I already enjoyed being alone. I cherished these solitary times, from a young age.

Being left alone helped me feel even more comfortable about being alone.  It gave me a sense of independence. Such independence greatly helped me later on, in my relationships and in my writing… For writing, and for creativity in general, solitude is necessary.  Interaction is crucial too, but processing these interactions properly  happen through taking a step back and figuring it all out by yourself.  I need this thinking time, this retrospection.  I don’t know if [my parents] gave me so much time, intentionally, as a sort of discretion, but I am grateful to have had it.

You can also pay attention to a child’s interests or curiosities and pick a perfect gift to enrich their solitude.

  • Albert Einstein’s father gave him a magnetic compass to figure out.
  • Photographer Ansel Adam’s father gave him a pass to San Francisco’s International Exposition where he studied exhibits at his own pace.
  • Creator of Modern Dance, Isadora Duncan’s mother took her to beach, every day, so she could dance with the wind on the sand.

Again, Natashka Moreau says,

My favorite thing I got for birthdays, were little diary books,  pale pink with lines.  You could close them with a little key, which allowed me to write all kinds of things. They came with ink pens and you would just change the color of the ink to turquoise.  Between 5 years of age until I turned about 11,  I wrote  so much little stuff. Probably not very interesting, though. I don’t know where those books are now.

Later,  I used black ink and wrote on white paper.

To play alone children need free time and one good tool, not necessarily a conventional toy,  but one with near endless possibilities.

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