Imagination Works

The major problem with our culture is the lack of a classical education and the ingestion of accelerant drugs. There. I’ve said it. Accelerant drugs is a term I made up. I’m talking about everything that revs us up too soon and too fast, from speed to diet pills to coffee or sugar–whatever makes you angry, roadrageous, and mean. When we are any of those things, we cannot learn.

Our future depends on learning.
A long time ago, education’s purpose was to show children that other people thought differently, behaved differently, and spoke differently. The purpose was not to extol one’s own culture, but to learn how to work in coalition with others. How to get along with others who don’t think like we do.

Once the industrial revolution hit, education branched off into vocational training–for those whose lives were to be spent in factories and at machine trades, and the upper classes, who studied languages and philosophy to learn how to think.

Somewhere in the 1960s, we hit a roadblock. If a subject didn’t have an immediate practical application, it was frowned upon. That quickly led to a “path” of learning. By seventh grade you were on the college track or on the vocational track, and you took courses accordingly.

And now we are paying for it. Children aren’t going to school, they are going to test-preparation classes. We aren’t teaching them how to think, or even what to think, we are teaching them to pass a test so “no child is left behind.” What we are doing is leaving a nation behind.

Right from the beginning, we are training creativity out of our children. We want them to color in the lines, and make sure the sky is blue, please. We teach them that there is only one right answer to every question. We take away the arts, music, dance, and replace them with organized sports that don’t allow for individual creativity, but praise competition and winning. Our educational system today is not appropriate for the 21st century. It is narrow, destructive of creativity and human potential, and squashes the one thing that will bring us safely into the future: original ideas that are practical and work. In a word, creativity.

Everyone is born creative. To paraphrase Picasso, the problem is not in creative children, it’s in remaining creative as we grow up. Instead of asking, “Is this the only answer?” we ask “Is this the answer that we need to know for the test?”

Wally Olins, Founder, Wolff-Olins says, “Competitive advantage does not come from the Internet. It comes from leveraging creativity. ” Maybe it’s time we remembered what education means. It comes from the Latin and means “to bring out of” and not “to stuff into.”

For a great take on creativity and education, watch Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on education. It’s not only bright, it’s very funny.

–Quinn McDonald had a classical education and thinks she’s still creative because of it. That, and she isn’t afraid of making mistakes. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

–One-room schoolhouse is the Mt. Zion school house, Snow Hill, Maryland.

Awake at Night, Alone and Afraid.

You don’t appreciate a good night’s sleep until you can no longer take it for granted. You long for a good quality of sleep and will settle for staying asleep longer than three hours. Once you feel awake, you either push yourself fully awake, or try to get back to sleep. Most often, you fall into a tossing, churning place of half-sleep and weird dreams.

Monkey mind keeps you distracted and awake
The instant you push yourself awake, monkey mind starts listing the things you need to get done, the dwindling amount of money in your bank account, the stupid thing you said, on and on until you are awake, far from sleep.

As a woman of a certain age, I am familiar with nighttime monkey-mind—the chattering, nerve-wracking, topic-hopping self-talk that won’t let you rest. The anxiety-filled dreams aren’t any better. They won’t let you wake up and won’t let you sleep deeply.

Using insomnia in a creative way
What’s a creative person to do? Rest is so important to creativity (and sanity) that waking up at 2 a.m. creates stress in the realization that you will feel pulled through a keyhole the next morning.

After spending too many nights punching pillows and plucking at sheets, I decided there had to be something better than trying to force myself to sleep (doesn’t work) or running to-do lists through my head (not productive). What could I do that engaged my mind, calmed my nerves and ended up contributing to something creative?

Start simply, add creativity
I started small. Using an exercise from my creativity coach mentor, Eric Maisel, I find a comfortable position and say (in my head) the word “Hush,” dragging out the ‘sh’ sound for a breath. After a little practice and concentration, it quieted monkey-mind. First step accomplished.

Next, I added visualization. While keeping monkey-mind quiet with ‘hush,’ I imagined walking down a long garden walkway. I concentrated on details—the kind of plants, the slant of the sun, the color of the blossoms. I imagined coming to a fountain in an open space. Next to the fountain, on the broad, stone edge, is a beautiful wood box. I become curious. “What’s in the box?” It could be anything wonderful—an idea, a symbol, an amulet, a design. I deliberately touch the box, feel the pattern in the lid, spend time in wonder. When I feel totally aware, completely present, and filled with curiosity, I open the lid.  What do I see?

The first few times, I saw things that belonged to me and were in the bedroom. No matter what it is, I lift it out of the box, hold it, wonder about it.  I remember it  for reflection the next day. Then I put the object back in the box, close the lid and walk back down the path.

It’s not always brilliant, but it’s always interesting
Often, by the time I walk back up the path, I’m asleep. But here are some other things that have happened:

1. Someone else comes into the garden. This isn’t a planned part of the visualization, but I let it develop. He says he can’t see his reflection in the fountain’s water. The next day, I reflect on the meaning, “What am I not seeing?” and “What part of me is not being seen?”  The answers helped clear up an old problem that I had been wrestling with.

2. When I opened the box, I found a small paper scrap, like an old postage stamp, but with raised writing that I couldn’t read. Eventually, this idea developed into silver Talistones, a part of my jewelry business that touches a deeply spiritual place in my clients.

3.  While in the garden, the season changes from warm to cold. I’m cranky because it just turned warm, and now it’s cold again. I suddenly jerk awake to discover my husband has wrapped himself in all the covers.

Sleep thinking makes an interesting dream journal
In most cases, I fall asleep during the visualization. The next morning, I write down what I remember of the visualization or resulting dream. Dreams evaporate quickly, so I write it down as soon as I wake up.

Sometimes, although complex, I feel the dream means nothing. Sometimes I feel it does, and I try to focus it into a meaningful action or idea. Sometimes the ideas take months to develop. Occasionally, I’ll go back and read dreams from months ago, and have ideas that are new.

Sleep thinking isn’t hard or a lot of work. Your brain has more downtime at night, so you can make the most of it. And getting back to sleep is a nice side effect of putting your brain to work.

(c) 2007. Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Think that being creative is fun? It is, often. Occasionally, not so much. There are some times when creativity sucker-punches you.

1. Really creative people are frequently lonely. In the 7th-grade, “You don’t X? Then you can’t be in the group,” way. Creative people’s ideas aren’t mainstream, and that can be scary for other people. The more out of the mainstream, the fewer friends you have. People can’t keep up with the idea stream, and the normal reaction is to step away from you. Second favorite is to step so far away from you, they don’t see you anymore.

2. The people who hang around you don’t like your ideas. Creative ideas can sound odd or weird to people who have trimmed their lives to fit in. That means they want to trim your ideas to acceptable, mainstream ideas–preferably something that exists already and is fairly popular. Which means it is not creative or new.

3 . Creative people change. They may not love change, but they understand how important it is. Their friends do not. They don’t want you to move away, get a better job, do something, or grow away from them. That means creative people will have to leave friends behind sometimes.

4. Your ideas are not marketable. In a consumer society, that can be very discouraging. Your idea may be way ahead of its time, it may be too hard to fit into the mainstream, and forgetting about it seems easier than working on it. It is always your decision to pursue either the pure creativity of the idea–to test the theoretical limits, or to re-shape your idea into something marketable. Both of them have advantages, but no matter which one you choose, you’ll spend 30% of your time wondering if you did the right thing.

5. You can’t stop. Being creative needs practice. That brings with it the constant need to startle your family and friend with your ideas. Sometimes it gets tempting to do something very ordinary. That’s a good idea. But falling in love with very ordinary can mean trading in your idea-toys for very ordinary. One way to stay creative is to keep the day job. It keeps the pressure off your creativity and lets you surround yourself with normal people.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach. In the last day job she had, her boss called her in and started her performance review with, “You are different and seem to enjoy it.” She was, and she did and she got fired. Again. She now owns her own business doing things both startling and ordinary.
Visit her website.

Yesterday’s blog  discussed how slamming  doors doesn’t solve problems, improve our chances, or give us perspective—it simply puts up another barrier to what is possible in our lives.

When barriers become become our horizons, we seriously limit our opportunities and our world.  Once we feel put upon and martyred, we believe there is no way out. And worst of all, we don’t see it as a world of our own creation, so we feel target our anger at someone else—generally, the very people we love.

What’s the solution? Depends on what you want. If you want a big, authentic life with opportunities and choices, here are some things to think about.
1.    Don’t be so fast to generalize a bad experience. A bad experience could be a one-time event. Not every event carries a life-changing lesson.

2.    Accept your responsibility in the choices you make. It’s easier to change the future if you see your part in it.

3.    Stay in control of your decisions. Don’t let other people direct your life, choose your friends, make your decisions for you. Make your own decisions; the consequences will be yours, too.

4.    What happens is not nearly as important as how you react to what happens. How you react determines the real outcome.
Example: Someone cuts you off in traffic.
Reaction one: the guy is a moron, you give him the finger and yell curses. While you are yelling, the light changes, and you cause an accident. Now you have to deal with your anger, possible injury and your damaged car. And the realization that the accident is your fault.
Reaction two: You are irritated, take a few deep breaths, stay in control of your car. You stop as the light changes. No accident.

The more doors we slam, the smaller the space we have to live. With each door we slam, we choose to be less tolerant, less flexible, less creative, less generous, less magnificent. We feel uncomfortable living in a house of slammed doors because we know we are being less than we are capable of.

Maybe it’s time to open some of those doors and let some light and fresh air back in. Take a look in those closed-off rooms. There’s a part of you in there that could use a new look at the world.

My friend Anna and I were having lunch. She ordered a Thai salad that came with peanuts, and asked the waiter to eliminate the nuts because she was horribly allergic.

“I didn’t know you were allergic to peanuts,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said, adding, “but I don’t like them and I should be able to get what I want. If I tell them I don’t like them, they won’t remove them.”

We got the orders to go and moved to the outside patio. It was one of the first perfect spring days—sunny and mild. I moved toward a table and Anna said, “Not there. It’s too close to the street, and the dogs that walk by get their bacteria-filled noses too close to my food.” That left a place in the sun and a place in the shade. Anna refused to sit in the sun because UV rays cause skin damage and disliked the shade because it was under a tree filled with chattering birds—and she wasn’t risking “ bird poop on my lunch.”

We moved back inside, and Anna found a table that met her needs—not too close to the window’s glare, not too close to the kitchen’s noise, and absolutely not too close to the ladies’ room door. I felt relieved we found a table that worked for her.

Setting limits on your life doesn’t expand your universe
As the conversation crossed over from the expected cicada explosion to Anna’s yoga class, I discovered that Anna had asked to work from home if the cicada numbers were more than she could stand, because she hated flying bugs, and that the yoga teacher had offended her because he had demonstrated a meditation technique that was not the same as her meditation teacher used. She had quit the yoga class.

“How will the one meditation interfere with the other?” I wanted to know.
“I chose my meditation technique very carefully,” Anna said. “I don’t want something else interfering with it. I’d have to ask my meditation instructor if it was OK to try something else. I don’t want to risk damaging what I’ve learned.”

“But you enjoyed the yoga so much. Why quit the whole class over a demonstration?”

Anna shrugged. “I thought it was offensive that he would barge into our yoga structure with a meditation technique. My first husband was like that—always buying g new stuff and bringing it home without asking. I’m not going through that again.”

Limiting our lives takes work
Since that lunch, I’ve given a lot of thought to how we manage the space in our lives. We start out as babies, the whole world open before us. As new experiences come to us, we learn, make decisions, learn consequences.

Then we begin to close doors to experience. We have a bad experience, generalize the consequence. We won’t try that again. Slam! That room is closed off. Our friends make fun of us because we like country music. Slam! goes the door on people who don’t like country music. We meet a man who is a vegetarian. Uh-oh, the last boyfriend who was a vegetarian was a lousy cook. Slam! No more vegetarian boyfriends. And while we are at it—Slam! No more lousy cooks in our lives.

It doesn’t take long for us to limit ourselves. If we slam enough doors, our lives get small with limited choices. The choices we have left don’t seem interesting anymore. We feel emotionally claustrophobic. But we resist change or new things. After all, we reason, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ Vulnerability could lead to pain, and we know we don’t like that.

What we resist, persists
Slamming the door doesn’t solve the problem, improve our chances, or give us perspective—it simply puts up another barrier to what is possible in our lives. The barriers become our horizons, and we begin to take on the chore of living in that limited world. Pretty soon we feel put upon, martyred, with no way out. And worst of all, we don’t see it as a world of our own creation, so we feel trapped and angry at someone else—the boyfriend who couldn’t cook, the friend who hates country music.

Tomorrow: some exercises that lead to solutions. Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. You can see her notecards, journals and handmade paper bowls here.

My Father’s memory is of the back of his head. He was always studying, taking notes, learning. He came home from work, ate the supper that was ready when he came home, and spent each evening reading, studying, working on projects that he brought home. His office was also our dining room, so we knew to clear the table quickly after dinner, slide the table back into the slot in the wall, and leave my father to his work. He was neither a tyrant nor a pal. He was, in fact, a rocket scientist.

He was also a talented artist. He used his gift for technical drawings, but he occasionally did small drawing for us and turned them into birthday cards or notes. Occasionally, he would become briefly involved in his children’s lives. One afternoon, I was destroying a slice of bread, trying to get cold peanut butter on the freshly-baked slice. He surveyed the scene, took in my frustration, and said, “Take care of the edges, the middle will take care of itself.” He was right. The sturdy crust helped the edges hold onto the cold peanut butter, and as I carefully applied it up to the edges, the spread warmed and made it easy to hit the soft middle.

Turns out that this advice works well in the rest of life as well. Fitted sheets attached by the corners, pull the wrinkles out across the middle of the bed. Watercolor and acrylic backgrounds, started at the edges will not buckle the paper and won’t get overworked in the center of the page. Same with the glue in a collage—start it at the edges, work it carefully into the corners, and the middle will be done without effort.

And problems, solved from the outside in, stay solved. When we get involved with just the middle of a problem, it often continues to creep out along the edges of our lives, creating more work. Squelching a rumor with a loud assertion doesn’t have nearly the effect as living a credible life. Who knew that a peanut butter sandwich, observed by a rocket scientist, could echo so well over time?

–Photo, above, of her father’s family. Quinn McDonald creates notecards, journals and paper bowls as an artist and is a certified creativity coach who watches the edges of peoples lives, knowing the middle will take care of itself. See her work at www.QuinnCreative.com

When “satisficing” just won’t do

“Satisfice”? It’s a word made up from “satisfy” and “suffice” and describes a solution found by trial and error, a solution that becomes the default way to achieve a result.

It’s often not the best solution, but it’s the one we use again and again. Why? Because it is a way we stumbled upon without help. We insist, “ Its MY solution. I love it because I don’t want to spend time learning something that might work better when I have something that works fine now. . . . Mostly.”

We got the word from Herbert Simon, a physicist and Nobel laureate from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s the way most people use their computers, learn new software and figure out their cell phones. I learned Excel by satisficing; when I took a class I was amazed at how hard I had made simple calculations, using six keystrokes when I could do it in two.  It was hard to unlearn my old ways, too. I knew what I was doing the other way, cumbersome though it was.

Satisficing isn’t bad. It’s sometimes all we need. But  there are other solutions—ones  that may be better, faster, easier, or provide satisfaction in additional ways. But moving away from satisficing becomes hard once we’ve become used to doing it “our” way. We integrate the satisficing into how we run our life. Habits are hard to dislodge, even if they are not in our best interests.

The Action
We satisfice in many ways. We do it in our lives when we choose a job because it pays for the mortgage and food bills and provides health insurance. It doesn’t fulfill the dreams we have about helping people, or about creating something, or about making a contribution to the world of learning. We stay in that job because it satisfices.  Occasionally we think that we aren’t that job, but after a while, that job becomes what we do with our life.  And when that nagging displeasure starts, we try to bury it by working harder.

The Traction
How are you satisficing in your life?
What is the ease of the satisficing you are doing?
What is the cost? (To your health, to your peace of mind, to your image of yourself)
Pick something that you used to love when you were younger—drawing with crayons, finger-painting, writing in your diary, playing the piano—and indulge yourself for half an hour in this pleasure. This is your private life, for you, not for anyone else. Don’t judge it, don’t try to make it into something. Just enjoy the moment, the smell of the crayon, the squish of the finger-paints, the secret thoughts in your diary.
You are not your job. You are so much more.
What can you do with that knowledge?

Last week I sat down in my studio and . . . nothing happened. My mind was racing with to-do items, preparations for my next show . .but not with a single creative idea for my work. When I checked in with myself, I found that I was tired and was rejecting ideas as quickly as I thought of them. Exhausted from a long run of retail art shows and evening-class teaching, I was out of creative energy. It was time to take a break, to re-charge creatively. Some artists with whom I am taking a class confessed that they, too, face creative burnout.

So what are some of the resources you use to recharge their creative batteries? Read what these people do, but please do post your own creative battery-charging ideas. I’d love to see what you do when the blahs hit.

Kathy Cano Murillo, who runs a website on Chicano pop art and is a reporter for The Arizona Republic, says that she courts creativity by always having a space stocked and set up, ready to go. When inspiration comes, she has a landing place for it. But what about when the ideas dry up?  She gets going on a new technique. “. . .it’s easy to get burned out on making the same things. But by taking on new materials and techniques, it always makes me feel refreshed and my work comes out more interesting.” She also refreshes her creative well by never letting it run dry. “I always look for new materials in unusual places—many times not from any store, but from places I travel or things that people normally throw out. That’s what drives my creativity!”

Tina Games-Evans, a freelance writer in Alexandria, Virginia, gets a creative boost “by taking time to connect with nature. Sitting with my journal perched high on the mountainside, I take in the beauty of nature while breathing clean, fresh air. My head clears and my anxiety disappears.”

Pam Burke, a fabric collage artist from Middletown, New Jersey, heads for the library—the children’s section. “I read the latest humorous children’s picture books – funny pictures and puns wake up the unconventional parts of my brain and the giggling wakes up my body.” It has to be great for the kids, too, to see her giggling and enjoying herself!

I also got an answer that confused me at first, but made sense on closer reflection. Rick Stansberger, a writing teacher from Silver City, New Mexico, told me that the poet William Stafford never had writer’s block. “When we block,” Stafford said, “it’s because our standards are too high. What you do then is lower your standards.” Rick adds, “It works. I’ve never had a single day of creativity block since then.” The idea is to keep creating. Not to stop, not to walk away from your studio, because each time we leave our studio unfulfilled or unhappy, we risk not returning. Doing some work, even if it isn’t our best, is better than quitting, Rick said. “I might not be creating on a given subject or in a given medium, but I can always create something.” And sometimes, when we create without pressure, without that high bar we so often set for ourselves, we can venture into a new area of creativity without fear. That leads to interesting results, as the next artist found out.

Nan Fischer from Taos, New Mexico, moves into a different field entirely. She took a break from her studio and did some tile work for a gardener.  She tackled the new task with no experience but with “some great instruction and support from a friend and the tile store. What a boost that was!” The benefits of taking on something unfamiliar? “It expanded my abilities, gave me something else to add to my portfolio and reaffirmed for me that the creative process is the same for all our creative endeavors. It also elevated my self-confidence that I can start and finish whatever I put my soul into.”

That’s the real secret to restoring your creativity: knowing that you can return to your work after a break with self-confidence.

Tip of the Moment: It’s easy to keep so busy you don’t realize the energy is running low until it’s gone. Plan some work breaks along the way. Call a friend and plan an outing to a museum, a gallery, or a lunch in a beautiful setting at least once a month. Particularly when you don’t have time. Once you are creatively run down, it’s harder to charge up. Setting dates with friends makes it more fun and less likely you won’t go.

Wabi-Sabi—Appreciation of the Imperfect and Impermanent
You are looking in a shop window at a display of antique maps. Suddenly, you see the reflection of a youngster behind you, also looking at the maps. The eager face reminds you so much of your younger self– fresh, ready for anything. That fragile moment of recognition is part of the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi– the beauty of things impermanent or incomplete. It contains a profound appreciation for things modest and humble. As an aesthetic, it honors things imperfect and unconventional.

A Different Approach to Success and Abundance
Wabi-sabi is the release of control. It avoids beating up the creative soul for not achieving perfection. Recognizing and embracing our imperfections allows room for growth. The only result of demanding perfection is certain failure. Perfection is impossible, and while we live in a culture that loves people who are “passionate” and “give 110%,” we seldom feel passion for our daily lives, and it is impossible to give more than all. Perfection is a cruel boss. It leads to giving up, depression and anger rather than eagerness for growth and improvement.

Living a wabi-sabi life means letting go of the stress of competition, relentless achievement, and replacing them with a willingness to let life find its own pace. It allows for space to trust that opportunities will appear, and a willingness to let the world unfurl without having full control over every activity. It is a life stripped down to what is valuable, rather than randomly acquired. It is not living without, but rather within.

In a wabi-sabi life, you recognize all things are impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. Once you open the door to imperfection, a creative force rushes into your life, making it possible to risk, to try different solutions, to explore your creativity fully. Which leads to living a creative life–work and business combine to create a full, rich and abundant life.

How to Live a Wabi-Sabi Life
One of the hardest things to do is live in the moment. We are always planning—what to have for dinner, what time to pick up the kids, what to do if that promotion doesn’t come through.

We live our lives in the past, reviewing our mistakes, and in the future, planning on contingencies and how to handle what will happen next. The current moment is empty as we rush to control—ourselves, our lives, the lives of our children. We try to control our creativity, what we make, even our intuition.

Certainly planning helps organize our time and leads to action. But when we begin to plan for every possibility, guess at every motive, fill every second of the day with planned activities, meetings and obligations, we exhaust ourselves and our families.

We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Often we can’t influence the future. What we think of as failure is simply a lack of knowing. You don’t always have to know. And you don’t always have to be in control. Take off that heavy obligation of knowing and controlling and take three deep, slow breaths. Then decide right now. In this moment. To live and grow. And leave perfection behind. And let creativity take root in your life.

Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She has a website at QuinnCreative.com