Lessons from The Music Room No. 2: “Just Do” Cold Showers and Write Short Lists

Posted on March 21, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

For one year– from Spring 2010 to Spring 2011,  I turned my growing family into a laboratory.  My purpose– to set each of us on a Creative path of our own.  We began in the grand central space we call The Music Room.  Our old piano is here and our shelves are stuffed with great books.  There are Kapla blocks to build with and a wooden castle with queens and kings to play with. For one week I’m writing about what I’ve learned this year– about Creativity and what it takes to live it. Yesterday I wrote The Creative Life is a Struggle.

The Nike slogan Just Do It works well enough as my family’s current task-accomplishment (including all things creativity-related) plan.  I hope this is only temporary because I’m a big fan of the perfectly tuned schedule.

When my first daughter arrived my mother said,  She’ll take over your life until you get a good schedule.  But once you’ve got a schedule you’ll have time for anything you want.  And so it was.  At six months my tiny girl woke at 6 a.m.  I bundled her up, strapped her into a jogger-stroller and ran several miles before breakfast.  We ate at 7:30.   Then I sat her facing the bathroom shower on a bouncy chair with toys so I could shower in peace.  We took walks, sang songs, giggled and read books.  I made her baby food from scratch and tried complicated recipes (i.e., Shitake-mushroom fried polenta topped with tomatoes, slivered almonds and parmigiano-reggiano) for dinner and she watched me.  Twice a week my lovely mother-in-law took over, while I took off for grad school.  I’m barely scratching the surface here.  More than a decade later (I may not be young), I still believe a perfectly tuned schedule is best.

That’s why I’ve tried all sorts of plans and schedules this year to put this creativity thing on rails. But all of them required more energy than they generated.  I nixed each plan when it turned more needy than a child.  Who wants a needy schedule?  I don’t.  Real kid voices (expressing human needs) filter into my dreams at day-break Sunday through Saturday. Check out my current (not-so-needy) 5 item schedule:

  1. I nurse the baby.
  2. I head for my semi-private wake-up chamber–  the cold shower.  (Did I use the word “cold’?  Freezing is more appropriate this time of year– Freezing showers are perfectly safe. I choose to do this, OK?)
  3. I dry my body with the available clean towel.
  4. I pull on my best jeans, dab on the lipstick.
  5. I run the rest of the day (it’s kind of a blur– except when I follow my two-year-old outside and read at the same time, or when I drive to kid-classes or when I lecture at the University. And all running stops when I write.  Which I do almost every day. Some days I even write three pages of long-hand free thought.

Someday I’ll return to a perfectly tuned routine– all Highly Creative people fashion favored schedules.  To read some favored routines I’ve come across check out my series: Routines.

But back to now.  Let me tell you, with five children under twelve–  it’s just impossible to follow a perfectly tuned schedule.  For children each little habit expressively worked on (e.i., flushing the toilet after use or signing every piece of artwork) takes thirty days of practice.  Perfectly tuned schedules are built of a thousand little habits.  You do the math.  So instead, we all meet in The Music Room and make short lists (one for each person above five-years-old) and each finds a way to do it.  On Sundays,  I often have only one item on my list– Write.  And I do.  Of course I still bathe the baby, drive the kids to hit tennis balls and make lunch.  But those things tend to get done list or not.  A one-item “To-Do” list makes you happy at the start but turns exhilarating when you’re finished.

Just Do It is the motto of the determined desperate.  The person who came up with the motto (don’t tell Nike)–  a serial killer about to die for his crimes and ready to get dying over-with, was certainly desperate.  I admit I’m not always determined or desperate.  But this post is proof Just Do It is working out for now.

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Today (March 21, 2011) is…

…The exact One Year Anniversary of Creating Brains!

To my faithful readers:

Thank you for sticking with me. Just knowing you’re there adds intensity and relevance to every word I write. Thank you!

To those who’ve left comments:

A capital THANK YOU!  Your feedback keeps me thinking–  what a gift.

To all my Hitters (is that a word yet?)– Creating Brains has been visited over 9,000 times so far!  Whoop-y! Hurray!

Thank you all for visiting.

Filed under: Lessons from The Music Room, Making Time, Mantras to Increase Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Sleeping Around in London

Posted on March 13, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Before I start today’s post, I must disclose.  I sleep some,  but not enough to think and walk at the same time. My 11-month-old still nurses through the night.  I get up when she cries at night because I want her to fatten up and grow long.  And, she is my precious baby after all. So, against medical advice (my physician sister-in-law looks out for me–  she thinks I need more sleep),  I sleep some and figure, someday I’ll sleep more. And besides,  I can always find a chair to land on if I feel a thought coming.

It turns out, you don’t need a set amount of sleep at precise intervals to think original  thoughts.  Creativity scholar Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi found highly creative people work with their bio-rhythms.  They arrange their lives to sleep when tired but work when they’re sharp– regardless of hour.  My current baby-controlled schedule is not ideal ( i.e., running a 5k this morning seems impossible) but it’s not horrible for creativity.  I’ve had plenty of brilliant insights in between mid-night naps (unfortunately, I don’t always remember them by morning)  and I’ve found my sharpest hours seem to fall between 1:00 a.m. and dawn (if, I’ve slept early and deep the previous three nights).  I’ve made peace with my sleep issues and continue. My good friend Jennifer says, In a year, things will be different.  She’s right.  I can imagine longer nights a year from now.

Some friends– a high-flying London couple, are about to have their first baby.  She’s a novelist.  He’s a club DJ by night,  international lawyer by day.  Their spacious Hackney flat has plenty of space for the gear they’ll need and they both love kids. They’re more than ready;  they’re giddy non-stop with anticipation.  There’s only one small problem.  They love their current party-almost-every-night, sleep in, work late and do it all again life rhythm.  Last time I visited them,  the guy asked,

Do kids HAVE to go to bed early?  I mean,  that doesn’t make sense.  My sister is adamant.  She says, Just wait.  You’ll see.  Kids HAVE to go to bed super early. It’s just the way it works. But why would that be?  I mean, as long as they get the amount they need–  you know, like 8 hours,  or whatever.  Right?

I said,

I don’t know. I suppose you could convince your baby you live in another time zone–  you could carry around a full-spectrum light lamp in your diaper bag and shine it on your kid’s face at sundown.  And shut the blinds in her room in the morning,  so she still thinks it’s night. That shouldn’t be too hard–    days are pretty dark here in London anyway. I don’t know.  I haven’t tried it.

I don’t remember where our conversation went from there.  But now (two years later) I wonder if they’ll try to make the baby adjust to their time.  Will they lug her around London’s night-scene in a sound-proof bassinet?  I doubt it.  I think the novelist will nix any exceedingly silly plan.  But she is pretty flexible and does like to try things out.

In any case,  the man’s question is a good one.  Do babies need to sleep when 7:30 p.m. hits wherever they are?  I’ve always stuck to a traditional bedtime.  But, I’d love to watch the London couple trick their baby into sleeping exactly when they’d like her to sleep. If they pull this off,  they should write a book and I bet it would hit the bestseller list on Day 1.

Filed under: Biology, Creative Families, Following Rules, Living the Creative Life, Music, Parents, The Child | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Hee! Hee!–Freud Slipped With Piaget

Posted on January 21, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

One of the best things about having young children is that they think your jokes are funny. This morning, my two-year-old needed help getting out of the bathtub. I held out a clean towel for her to step into, wrapped her up and set her on the bath-rug. I watched her dress–undershirt first, then flowery cotton dress.  She then stood smiling with feet apart and hands on her hips. I smiled back and said,

Look at you!  You can dress yourself!

She stayed put for three seconds.  Suddenly, she raised her eyebrows and said,

Oops!  I forgot my panties!

She searched the area.  Then looked to me for help.

Where are they?  Where are my panties?

I shrugged and whispered as if telling her a secret,

I think they are hiding!

She burst out laughing. We both melted into giggles at the slightest hint of silliness for an entire hour.

A stand-up comedian friend of mine once said,

Humor is the highest expression of human intelligence.

This assertion seems a bit of a stretch, but it isn’t too far off.  The fact that my two-year-old gets my little jokes means she can tell the difference between imagination and reality–surely this is a sign of at least budding intelligence.

Although most cognitive psychologists today would agree with me, this flies in the face of what Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud believed about children’s cognitive abilities. Both believed children produced so much fantastic, unreal play because they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnick says,

The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.

One of the most respected philosophers on Creativity, Arthur Koestler, believed the moment you get a joke is a crucible between higher intelligence and lower reflexes. In his 1964 book The Act of Creation, he says,

Humour [sic] is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes.

My joke anthropomorphizing my daughter’s panties was far from brilliant. It was almost reflexive.   I didn’t think about it.  It popped into my head and I said it. But if not a measure of my intelligence, my daughter’s reaction to it proved she’s smarter than Sigmund Freud or Jean Piaget would have thought–and that is just plain cool.

Filed under: Creative Families, Idea Sharing, The Brain, The Child | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Twelve Children and a Fifty-Fifty Proposition Throughout

Posted on September 20, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  This is the last post on the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Strict Schedule as Newbie Novelist.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

1952: “The World’s Greatest Woman Engineer”

Inventor, Writer,

Founder of Modern Management

Mother of Twelve (of Cheaper by the Dozen Fame)

“Lillian worked hard during the Providence [Rhode Island] years.  In addition to producing a baby every fifteen months or so, she ran Frank’s business during his frequent absences, researched and wrote an entirely new doctoral dissertation, and authored most of the books and papers that appeared under Frank’s name. Although her activities and stamina seem prodigious, a typed copy of “Mother’s Daily Schedule,” dated July 11, 1912, may explain how she managed to do so much.”

Historian Jane Lancanter includes this schedule in her book Making Time: Lillian Moler Gilbreth–A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the dozen.“

It read:

“The schedule includes a note in Lillian’s handwriting: ‘Important to start family off each day–’cheerful and happy.’  Eliminate worry and rush by proper planning’.”

‘No matter what happens I manage two hours of rest and quiet immediately after lunch. This is the best time for me as most of the children are at school and the little fellows are out of doors and the house is the quietest.’

“She neither cooked nor cleaned, and although she scheduled much more time with her children than women who work outside the home usually manage, she had assistance with the children during the hours she spent on her professional work. In fact, hers could almost be seen as a leisurely schedule.  In addition to Martha Gilbreth (her mother-in-law), who acted as household manager, an English widow named Anne Cunningham did most of the cooking, and Tom Grieves, an Irishman, became the Gilbreths’ man-of-all-work.”

“Tom did the washing, ran errands, shopped, and became somehow indispensable. The older children adored him.  He was a mimic, a dancer, a harmonica player, and a whistler, and he would bang his chest melodramatically and insist he had been a fool ever to permit himself, to be “shanghaied” into this crazy household, where the work kept increasing with a new baby every year. He would sigh deeply and say, “Lincoln freed the slaves, all but one, all but one.”

“They [lived] in a clapboard house on Brown street…it was only half a block from the Brown University campus, so although the house had a very small backyard, the children could play on the main green, at least when the students weren’t around.  They were so close to Brown (where Lillian completed her doctorate), that, Frank [Lillian's husband] joked, Lilian “could go to class and if a child fell out the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”

“Tom and Mrs. Cunningham put the house in order.

“Much of the first floor was devoted to offices; two stenographers worked in one room, typing away from the Dictaphones that Frank and Lillian spoke into “at any hour day or night.”

“Lillian also found a well-educated mother’s helper, Helen Douglas, who was a student at Pembrike, the women’s college at Brown…Frank interviewed Helen, scaring her to death with questions about teaching, playing with, and disciplining young children. “I meekly said I’m a freshman wanting to study to be an English teacher–I’ve never been with young children so I’d just have to do what seemed proper on the occasion.”

“Frank hired her. He said, “I’ve just hired her because she doesn’t know a damn thing.” The Gilbreths sent Helen to a Montessori school to get a little training.

“With a full compliment of household assistants in place, Lillian was poised to play a more public part in Gilbreth and Company, management consultants.

“Frank wound down his construction business and became, in partnership with his wife, a management consultant.  He also participated in all childcare basic care duties and education.

Lillian said,

“It was a fifty-fifty proposition throughout.  Any woman can do it with that sort of husband.“

(Taken from Jane Lancaster’s book Making Time: Lillian Moler Gilbreth–A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the dozen.“, Pp. 130-132)

Filed under: Complexity, Creativity by Habits, Design Thinking, Supportive Spouses | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Schedule Queen & Mother or Four

Posted on September 12, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Same Routine for 52 Years & No Teaching Job.

Susan Wise-Bauer

Writer, Historian, English Professor, Founder of Peace Hill Press

Where is your favorite place to write? Time of day?
Last year, my father turned an old chicken shed on our farm into a separate timber-framed office for me. Until then, I’d used a little room in our attic. There were points to being the madwoman in the attic, but I had so many books in piles that there was only a narrow path between the door and my desk. My new office is close to the house, but because it’s a separate building, I can’t hear the children thumping and yelling while I’m working.

As far as time of day—I probably do my best work first thing in the morning, and on mornings when I don’t go running, I enjoy going down before sunrise with a cup of coffee and getting right to work. But this is a job for me; I keep to a pretty strict schedule, and when it’s time for me to write, I sit down and get started.

How do you make time for research and writing when you’re also homeschooling your children, teaching at William and Mary, finishing your doctorate, running a family farm and publishing company, and active in your church community? Do you keep office hours? Burn the midnight oil? Make your kids take 4-hour naps?

No, just two-hour naps.

There are four intersecting answers to this question. First: I enjoy my work, and I work at a naturally quick pace. Everyone’s got a different natural tempo; my parents say I was born on fast-forward.

Second: Although I’ve done all of those things at various times, I don’t think I’ve ever done them all simultaneously. When my children were smaller I taught more and wrote less, and didn’t have a publishing company. Now that I’ve got a publishing company and a busier writing career, I’ve taken a teaching leave from William and Mary (I’m a “research associate” right now, which means I can keep my faculty privileges without teaching—I couldn’t function without my year-long-checkout-no-limit-no-overdue-fees faculty card). I’m still active in my church community, but I’ve limited my involvement to one major volunteer role and I’m getting more ruthless about declining every other opportunity. And as for the doctorate—well, I’m thirty-eight, and I’ve just finished my dissertation defense, which is not exactly fast-track. It takes longer when you’re leading a regular grown-up life.

Third: I have a lot of help. My husband has a flexible schedule and does a good part of the home schooling; we divide our work and family responsibilities between us. We both parent, we both work, I do the cooking and he does the grocery shopping. My mother has taught all of the children how to read and continues to work with the younger two. My father manages the farm and is the CEO of the publishing company—I handle the creative end, and he handles the business end. Plus my mother and I share a housekeeper, and I have a personal assistant who comes in once a week to get me organized and do all the random things (from dry cleaning to library runs) that I haven’t gotten around to. No working wife and mother does it all—she hires help, or else decides what to leave undone.

Fourth: I am the Schedule Queen. I have a master family calendar that I keep both in a Daytimer and on my iCal—the iCal also has all my work deadlines on it, so that I don’t schedule a family vacation and a manuscript delivery for the same week. Our days run on a very regular pattern: the kids always know what they’re supposed to be doing, which parent is on kid duty and which is working, and what the next part of the day holds. Unless I’m on vacation, I’m up by 6 AM, go running, shower, and either get to work or start on my day with the kids by 8 AM. We have lunch, regular afternoon alone time/rest time, regular bedtimes. That may sound a little Von Trappish, but it sure lends itself to peace and order. (Also we have one day a week where we all sit around in our bathrobes and eat popcorn for breakfast if we feel like it.)

(Thanks to Mindy Winthrow).

Filed under: Creative Families, Creativity by Habits, Focus, Supportive Spouses | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Five Tales of Focus & Flow

Posted on August 11, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

I’m trying to hide my hands. I wonder,

How exactly do I type, if I don’t want the Starbucks-sipping, friendly-old-couple the next bench over to see my sloppy, million-dollar-red fingernail job?

No vampire at fault here;  just my two-year old earlier this morning, in a moment of Pre-Creativity flow. I couldn’t stop her. I didn’t even want to. I let her paint away. No rush. No comments.

Of course she didn’t thank me for my sanguine permissiveness. Instead, she stepped back to admire her work.  I felt proud of her too, not for her spa skills, but for her pride.

I’m a good mom, and regardless of what my coffee-shop neighbors think, I’m happy to have scary, possibly-mentally-disturbed-mom fingers.

Knowing when to interrupt children, like any art, takes practice.  But undisturbed skill-building moments are crucial for future Creation.

While I played patient princess for the 2 yr.old, my 11 yr.old sat trying to paint in peace in a Monart class, but could not. The teacher made suggestions and gave out tips unsolicited on the minute. My daughter said,

Mom, the class was fun, but… this teacher kept telling me to add something here or change my shading there.  She’s nice, but she keeps interrupting me!

The teacher’s failure to adopt her student’s point of view, if only for a moment, makes her infinitely less effective.  A student unable to enter flow  for a teacher’s interruptions could lose respect for the teacher. If the student is well-socialized, she’ll divert mental energy away from the project to fulfill the teacher’s need to be heard.

A few doors over from the art class, my 8  and 6 yr.-olds were constantly responding to a teacher also, in a Taekwondo class. Master Kang said,

High kick!

They did. He said,

Low kick!

They low-kicked.

He said,

Focus! Focus!

They moved even faster to dodge his kick-mitt. Both children definitely in flow, trying hard to follow every order to  fulfill a shared dream of invincibility to evil forces they read about in books. Interruptions sometimes make flow possible, but if my Taekwondo children are to play in the art, they will need mental energy to do it. The mental energy they now use to follow the Master’s split second calls.

Just in case you’re wondering, my littlest one seemed in flow, too.  She closed her eyes and drank milk. Slow and comfortable. In a perfect rhythm. I did not interrupt her either.

Filed under: Creative Families, Creativity's Nectar: Flow, Focus | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 5: Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers

Posted on July 31, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Fighting Entropy in the Renaissance.

While Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo perspired, inspired, someone paid for the bread they ate and the shoes they walked in. Most 16th Century men with families to support and trade to conduct made no time for domain-alteration in Creative endeavors. The wealthiest men, patronized inspired, intellectual, hard-working men. Still, theoretically, all men could indulge in creative pursuit, even if only on the side.

But the woman who made salads for Da Vinci or washed Michelangelo’s bed-sheets could not, at least theoretically. A women painting heart-stopping biblical violence in oil or discovering mathematical theorems was as likely as a wild dog chanting prayers in a monastery.

Yet, a handful of women in the Renaissance did alter their domains.

Artemisia Gentileschi, member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence, spent 10,000 hours as a child in her father’s busy studio. In her father’s shadow, and under his loving direction, she lived and breathed all things Caravaggio and was able to say,

As long as I live I will have control over my being.

Self-control, not a woman’s privilege in the Renaissance, is a must-have  of Creativity. Gentileschi knew this and presented her Creative gift wrapped in the cloak of womanhood.

My illustrious lordship,

Gentileschi said,

I’ll show you what a woman can do.

By age 7, Elena Piscopia spent her days with her father, among books: Latin and Greek, grammar and music before lunch, then Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

She tackled mathematics and astronomy,  philosophy and theology. Awed by her progress, Elena’s father insisted she attend the University of Padua, whose motto was Universal Freedom, to continue her studies. In 1678, she graduated, the first woman to receive a university diploma ever — Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who earned the Doctor of Philosophy and Mathematics.  She stayed on as a professor to lecture behind a curtain to prevent other University attendants from seeing her face to face.

Both ladies worked long and hard, both were inspired initially by their fathers and both were highly intellectual, and they also had self-control and someone who truly believed they were capable, both gifts in their time, yet ultimately indispensable to Creation.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Must Haves of Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The New “Room of One’s Own”: Free-Time for Intellectual Growth

Posted on July 21, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Chandra sits on the porch summer afternoons sipping  honey-chamomile iced tea. This is her spot.  The children play on the lawn. Her husband is designing matchbox-car slides for the boys, in his small-airplane-hanger sized workshop.  That is his spot.  Creativity researcher, Mihalyi Csikszenmihalyi would classify Chandra and her family as simple.  The family is integrated: they spend leisure time together or in close proximity.   They highly value family togetherness and harmony. The quiet pleasures are abundant, but intellectual curiosity is not.

Highly Creative people thrive on complexity and do best in families providing both integration; that is, emotional support,  warmth, harmony (lots of getting along and great communication) and differentiation;  individualized intellectual stimulation, with parental involvement and freedom to grow.

In complex families, rest is for expansion, not stagnation. Free time is to flow in the now and to find meaning in intellectual challenge. Csikszentmihalyi says

A complex family will help young persons enjoy serious activities, such as studying, that normally are avoided whenever possible because they require mental effort.

Children aren’t the only ones who benefit from a mentally stimulating home.  Csikzentmihalyi found

Parents in complex families reported the highest rewards from interacting with their child, the most agreement with their spouse, and the highest expectations for their child to find intrinsic rewards in a future career.

Unfortunately, most healthy/happy families around me do not aspire to complexity. Creativity is impossible without major time committed to intellectual growth, and parents that promote leisure at the expense of growth limit the potential of not only their children, but their own.  Creators seek flow in their free time.

French novelist Natashka Moreau’s boyfriend says,

In college, I was mucking around trying to fix my vintage Porshe while Natashka read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy for fun.

Differentiation support within families is sometimes gender biased.  Virginia Woolf, writing in the early 20th century, said,

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time .

Women are less poor today than in any other time in history, specially in the United States and Europe. But women are still underrepresented as Creators because intellectual expectations are often seen as frosting on a life well-lived, even in complex-type families, rather than core sustenance.

Juliette, a bright MIT Mathematics student interviewed by Dan Kindlon on differences in math aptitude between men and women, said,

I think it is important to make a distinction between ability and performance…I do not believe there is any inherent difference between the analytical capabilities of men and women, and I have certainly met enough brilliant women in my life to be confident saying this.

Social factors can dictate the extent to which these abilities are expressed.  Strong math and science ability may be inherent, but it is also a product of concentration, effort, interest, and motivation.

Concentration, effort, interest and motivation is learned within complex families.  My sweet friend Chandra’s 11 yr. old daughter wants to be a nurse when she grows up. But she will be no Florence Nightingale. She’ll make a difference with her compassion in hundreds of lives.  She’ll earn a good living, too.  But she will not change the domain for the benefit of humanity because she will most likely spend her free time relaxing, not in motivated concentration to achieve something much bigger than herself.

Filed under: Creative Families, Making Time | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

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