Way of Change. Hailey Klein
bell rings and time is up. Try to let go of the associations with scissors, paint, and paper, if they are lingering nearby in your consciousness. Being creative can quite simply mean looking at a familiar landscape or even a problem in a new way. Some of the most wildly creative folks I know do not make art for a living. They just can’t help being creative. It is just as involuntary as taking a breath. Thinking and acting creatively can be learned. My friend Wendy Walsh gives her students this Abraham Maslow quote: “People who are only good with hammers, see every problem as a nail.” How brilliant is that? This woman met her future husband on an airport bus and fell in love with him after saying yes to his invitation to Nepal. Don’t forget to ask the question and extend the invitation, and don’t forget to say yes. As another friend of mine says, “Instead of a quick no, how about a slow yes?” Try lots of different tools, not just hammers. Use them in combinations, turn them upside down, and use them backwards. You can’t imagine how much fun it is to break the rules.
We are creative all day, every day, in our problem solving and interactions. Creativity is not product- or end-result dependent, as many may have been lead to believe. Every situation we encounter requires some degree of right-brain activity. Organizing your closet is creative. Finding a way to handle a difficult confrontation is creative. Talking to children is creative. Creativity is the process, the experimenting, and the pushing oneself outside of the routine ways of being in the world. Don’t get hung up on the outcome. I am talking to you Type A personalities. So, this quote by Donald Kennedy is for you:
A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked “perfection.”
Thinking creatively gives us freedom, more room to move around in the universe. Acting creatively means breaking free of rigidity, coloring outside the lines. We may start to see the world differently and be in the world differently. The world becomes bigger, and the possibilities may seem limitless. Creativity has some risk involved, more like a happy challenge. I agree with abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler when she claimed, “I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.” Try something new, push yourself to feel the good fear, the fear that if you push through, it will make you exponentially stronger and a much more interesting human.
Creative inspiration comes from everywhere and sometimes out of nowhere. The fireflies blink their mighty little lights right outside the window and you can’t help but notice and wonder. You don’t want to catch them and put them in a jar, or they might die. You want to watch them for a while and see what happens. Creative thoughts happen like that. They can appear in your dreams or be inspired by a song on the radio, the colors in a room, or the clouds on the horizon. Mostly you just have to pay attention to the hints and inklings of inspiration all around you.
FREE-RANGE CHICKEN CREATIVITY
My friend Greg is an inspired cinematographer and musician. He most definitely lives a pan-creative life. He is a natural-born creative. Greg felt as if he had no other choice but to live a creative life. It is who he is. It was a burden when he was young to be told constantly, “Oh, Greg, you are so creative,” when he didn’t even know what that meant yet. He told me that later on he came to realize that maybe it meant he saw, heard, or experienced the world differently than other people. His mission became a journey to connect with like-minded folks to work and spend time with. At the risk of sounding born-again, Greg says that his creativity springs from “abandon, risk, and ultimately surrender.” He describes creative people as generally “thoughtfully, presently absent,” their minds drawing on past and future stimulation with influences flying in from everywhere. Greg thinks about it in terms of parameters and what he calls “free-range chicken creativity.” He said that unlike chickens, he needs some boundaries to his roaming in order to be content and at his best. If someone tells him to go shoot a scene the way he wants, for instance, with no clear direction, he feels as if he has too much wide-open space in the creative landscape. If, on the other hand, they tell him to shoot a scene to invoke the bleakest, most rainy day in London using only a gray palette but giving the slightest hint that the weather and mood may clear, well, then he has his parameters, and his creativity is unleashed and can run wild. Give yourself some parameters if the open range seems too vast, but don’t lock yourself in the chicken coop and refuse to come out.
I admit that I didn’t often read the poetry in The New Yorker until recently. I always read the cartoons. Well, I did read Sharon Olds’s and Mary Oliver’s poetry, which generally sets a spark or rocks a musical nerve. Once I saw their work there, I realized I had better take a closer look. Some hidden gems and inspiration may be lurking inside. You can never be sure where you will find creative inspiration, so keep your receptors open. It may hit you while you are dreaming, driving, or taking out the trash. Something or someone may be that ember that you can’t ignore. The idea, already in our subconscious, comes flying to the surface and we recognize it as it appears. A connection is made and our brain cells jump to attention, our fingers twitch, and a stirring down deep begins.
Don’t forget to write down ideas and inspirations, sing them, or dance them. Do something to act on them because they seem to disappear as fast as they arrive. I have scraps of paper and note cards in my car, by my bed, and tucked into books and journals and everywhere. Some of them have just a word or a line written on them. I never know how or when they will inspire me, but eventually they always do. We can have amazingly vivid dreams and remember them in the first few groggy moments of our waking, only to find all memory of them gone in the next seconds. Record it somehow. The information is significant. You might not know why immediately, so just let it be.
There are even workshops given in several places across the country that address accessing your creativity if you need an extra boost. Try one if you want. It would probably be great fun. My friend Wendy (remember, from the airport bus and the hammers?) is a photojournalist who teaches a class called “Learning to See.” She encourages her students to think differently about the process of making pictures. She reassures them that the technical information about photography can be learned, but each one of them will see and photograph the world differently. Wendy infuses them with the notion that their vision and perspective is truly unique. She gives her class the assignment of photographing a roll of toilet paper. Finding beauty in the mundane is creativity at its best. She encourages them (and me) to be curious and ask questions, especially “What if . . .?” and “Why not ...?” Here is one of my favorite quotes she gives to her class. It is by the late designer Tibor Kalman:
The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9).
I actually think we are more powerful and know everything at age nine because we tend to be so much more open to the possibilities in the world, but I understand what he is saying. I fall somewhere in between nine and fifty on the time line, but I have learned to learn again by just allowing. It is so fun to feel nine years old again. Try it.
Tap into your creative energy. Ask, “What if . . .?” of a problem or just let yourself explore colors and textures and shapes in the world.
Peonies, their scent and craggy pinkness, always remind me of my grandmother, and that makes me smile and get motivated, for she was an artist. Visits to her house in the very early spring meant big earthenware bowls full of paperwhites in the living room, their dynamic aroma greeting you eagerly as you entered the front hall.
Dodo (a nickname her brother had given her that stuck from childhood) had extensive flower gardens and worked in them every day in the summer. Fresh flowers filled the house. Ironically, my grandmother had no sense of smell. She lost it as a result of illness when she was young, yet she loved beautiful things around her and what she remembered as beautiful-smelling things. Today, even a single peony in a mason jar on my desk settles me into a creative space.
■ FAITH ■
Faith is not the same as believing. Faith is knowing and not knowing at the same time. Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore captured the essence of true faith when he wrote, “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” Faith is the fine line between sheer terror and a sigh of relief. Faith is a knowingness, a connection to and acceptance of the idea that we need to show up every day and say, “I am here and I am ready.” The not knowing