Tag: creativity

Battery Life

“Many of us have spent our lives being batteries for others.” – Julia Cameron.

Julia Cameron is the author of The Artist’s Way. Many creatives consider that book to be the one holy book, for getting creative juices to flow. I read The Artist’s Way once. Admittedly, at the time that I read the book, I was half-hearted about doing the activities described in the book, so I can’t honestly say that it moved me, in the way that this book has inspired so many other creatives. Recently I picked up Julia Cameron’s latest book (she has written about 40 books), The Listening Path, in hopes of maybe getting a better understanding of what I may have missed in The Artist’s Way. Truthfully, I like the fact that The Listening Path is a much skinnier book than The Artist’s Way. When I started reading The Listening Path last night, and I got to the quote written above, I got up from the couch, and I found a pen, and I underlined the quote three times. In fact, I must have been pressing so hard when I underlined that sentence that the line shows through with a teeny hole, on to the opposite side of the page. I find it hard to believe that I am the first person to do this. Certainly, I am not the first mother to do this.

No one asks us to be their batteries. It is not fair to put that onus on anyone else. But it is something we motherly types tend to do, and to become. I was having a text conversation with some friends yesterday, and we were talking about the fact that we will never stop worrying about our children, until forever. (and we are all mothers of mostly adult children) Yet, when we took on the role of “mother”, we never fully understood the depth of that responsibility, nor also the mother role’s deep, echoing emotional reach. When we put on the “mother robe”, it never fully occurred to us, that the mother robe is not removable, ever, and it can be a heavy robe, at times. When we entered into motherhood, it was like entering into any new adventure, like a new job, or a budding romantic relationship, or a new place to live – you have some ideas and expectations, of what you are getting yourself into, but you are never fully prepared. Pregnancy or adoption, is signing you on to an experience that you will have some level of responsibility for, (and also a whole heap full of vulnerability, and love like you’ve never felt, and sometimes even a few negative emotions like guilt, fear and resentment) for the rest of your life, and perhaps even beyond, without escape. And you sign on to this mother role, without fully grasping what this lifetime role really means for you, and for your children. Because no matter how good a storyteller, experience cannot really ever be fully captured in its entire scope and its full essence. Experience must be felt and it must be absorbed, while it is happening to you.

Therefore, when we mothers reach this emptying nest stage of our lives, where our family members are coming into their own “extended life battery” charge, it’s a jarring experience. We complain about being “drained”, but then we sometimes feel a little useless and listless, like a dangling plug. But yet we are also excited about the prospect of recharging our own batteries. Still, it feels rather foreign to us, to allow ourselves to take most of our own power back, for our own dreams and for our own goals. It feels a little strange and a little nerve-wracking, yet also extremely exciting and reinvigorating, to nurture our own selves, and our own passions, with the energy reserves that we had mostly given away, when raising our families. It is one of those times in life, like entering any new adventure, where we have some ideas and expectations, but we are never fully prepared. This is a new experience and experience must be felt and absorbed, while it is happening to you.

The interesting thing to note is that even now, in this empty nest stage of parenting, by giving the majority of your energy stores back to yourself, you are still, inadvertently, doing a crucial part of your mothering role. You are showing your children to value themselves, and to value their individual lives and dreams, and this example, might very well be the most important lesson which you ever impart to your precious children. You are freeing your children from feeling emotionally responsible for your life, and for your happiness. You are the one, bravely pulling the plug, knowing that your loved ones have the natural ability to keep themselves charged. You also know that a Universal Everlasting charge is always available to them, as it is, and has always been, available to you, for the rest of all of your lives.

We know by now, that our mother robe never comes off. And with experience under our belts, we fully understand what that means. But truthfully, as mothers, we don’t want the mother robe to come off, but still, it feels good to remember that we are the ones wearing the robes. Just as mothering is a profound pleasure and a great privilege, it is also a special pleasure and a privilege, to get reacquainted with, and curious about, the interesting, and multi-faceted “wearer of the robe,” and where her next adventures in life will lead her.

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Lucky Spot

“Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you are there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those staring outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.” – Glennon Doyle

I have been doing a lot of reading lately. Reading is one of my most favorite activities in the world and one of the silver linings to this whole social distancing thing, is that it gives me an excuse to do a lot more reading. I honestly consider reading to be an enormous part of writing. You get a level of intimacy with writers that you wouldn’t get with the average Joe who you meet on the street. Writers and other artists give you deep intimacy, outside of your own intimate circles. Creatives share their fragile, bared souls with strangers.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a particularly political person. I really want this blog to mostly be a sharing of what it is like for me to be in this “cocoon” stage of life, in between Act I and Act II of my adulthood. Hopefully, by writing this blog, I selfishly bring some outpouring and validation for myself, which also hopefully, resonates with others. Still, there were a couple of interesting Comments yesterday about the George Floyd death and the implications that it has had on all of us in society, that makes me feel the need to touch on this subject a little bit more. I can’t ignore what is going on in our world, no matter how many times I quickly flip past the news, to numb out, on a silly “reality” show. The blog’s starting quote is from Glennon Doyle’s new book UNTAMED. (excellent read, by the way, and I must give a shout out to James Madison University in Virginia. Glennon and I share the same alma mater!!!)

I am white. I was raised in an upper middle class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA. My public high school had graduating class sizes of over 600 kids. In my graduating class, three of my fellow students were black. Interestingly, our principal was a black man. At James Madison University, I belonged to a large, popular sorority. One of my sorority sisters was black, in all of the four years that I belonged to my sorority. My husband and I have raised our four children in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. We have always chosen suburban neighborhoods to live in, that had excellent public schools, frankly, because we didn’t want to pay for private school for four children. My kids’ experience with minorities in any of these schools, has been limited. This was not by design. This is not a fact which I am proud of. In fact, I often thought that my children’s limited contact with people different than us, was a major disservice to my children. Their schooling experience has been limited to white, suburban America. That is not representative of the real world. And yet, my kids will most likely be living and working and raising their own families with people who have come from all over the world, from every kind of experience which one can imagine. But if you haven’t been exposed to much different than yourself in your life, how well can you really empathize with other people’s viewpoints? How do you really know where other people are coming from, when your experiences have been very limited to “people just like you”?

What I am learning about myself, through this pain that our country is experiencing, is that I shouldn’t be so defensive about the label “racist.” I don’t hate anybody because of their background or the color of their skin. I know from every inch of my heart, how wrong that is, but it is also wrong to pretend that I understand other people’s feelings and experiences. It is wrong to assume that everyone comes from the same worldview I have, largely because my worldview has been created from my own limited experiences. Everyone has different experiences in life, and a lot of these experiences come from factors that are uncontrollable. None of us got to choose the color of our skin, our parents and siblings, the country we were born in, the financial status of our family of origin, the religion we were raised in (or not), our height, our genes etc. etc. Nobody gets to pick these things. Yet all of these factors have a whole to do with who we end up being as individuals. All of these factors have a whole lot to do with our perspectives of the world. All of these factors influence our views, our ideas, our morality, our emotions, and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives and other people.

Now to be clear, it is not healthy to live a resigned life, feeling victim of all of the factors that you could not control. Each of us has an ability to better our own personal experiences with factors that we can control. We can control our own efforts, our own attitudes, our own perspectives, our own choices and our own actions. And that is what each of us must keep a focus on, the factors that we, individually, can control, with the idea that what we say and what we do and what we think, not only has a major impact on our own lives, but also on the lives of others. No matter what our race is, we must all own the power of what we can control, the personal viewpoints and choices which are helping to influence the overall creation of our own lives, our families’ lives, and the experiences of our communities, our countries and our world.

For me, I think that the labels that get thrown around a lot, like “racist”, “racism”, “privilege”, are such loaded, hateful words that it puts me in a defensive mode. And when I’m feeling defensive, I’m not open. My ears are shut down to other viewpoints because I’m feeling shame that feels unfair and unjustified. I have a good heart. I know that and I know that most people in the world have good hearts, too. I have decided to use this horribly sad time in our history to stay open and to try to learn. I am trying to move past the labels to a deeper understanding. Defensiveness keeps me closed and limited. Understanding and connection comes from an open heart. I hope that soon after the raging anger and hurt, which we all have been experiencing, dissipates, all of us can come together with open hearts and elevate our united experience together, so that all our descendants don’t have to deal with the rehashing of these same problems over and over, again. These societal problems can be solved. We have that power. And if we truly open our hearts to new ideas, and perspectives, and a unified vision of a more peaceful, beautiful world for all of us, we will be shown the path to make it so.

Brutally Indescribable

I was reading an article that said that the Dutch people have about 700 new words in their lexicon, all related to the coronavirus. Here is just a few of them:

Huidhonger / skin hunger: a longing for human contact while in isolationAnderhalvemetereconomie / six-feet-economy: an economy constructed to avoid spreading coronavirusHoestschaamte / cough-shame: the anxiety one may experience about possibly triggering a panic among the people nearby when making a coughing sound for whatever reasonCoronahufter / coronajerk: shopper at a supermarket or store who violates the six-foot social distance prescription or other safe-keeping protocol.Druppelcontact / spray-contact: exchange of little droplets when sneezing or coughing, esp. as source of infectionOnthamsteren / dehoarding: processing long-stored shelf-stable food into a meal.Straatschaamte / street-shame: the embarrassment someone experiences when being out for urgently necessary errands during lockdownToogviroloog / blather-virologist: dilettante who spreads false or unsubstantiated information about the virus, its transmission, or its treatment (CNN)

This isn’t a new thing. I read this in an article about how wars have brought new words and new meanings to words, into our regular, every day vernacular.

“Through wars, some words have changed or garnered new meanings while others were newly coined for specific places and things. During the Civil War, “skedaddle” became “skeet” or “scoot.”

In World War I, the word “lousy,” which was intended to describe lice infestations, came to mean weary. In the same token, “trench coat” — a jacket worn in the trenches during battle — to this day remains an iconic outerwear style. “Jeep” came from the letters “G.P.” emblazoned on the side of each general purpose vehicle used during World War II.”- (Business Insider)

Why do we create new words, particularly in hard times such as wars and pandemics?

The same article says this:

“War words are often invented to describe things that are brutally indescribable, bring humor to things that are not funny, and create designations for things that are otherwise unidentifiable.” (Business Insider)

I think that is why I love writing. It is the act of trying to describe, to put meaning to, to bring a familiar understanding, and to even bring humor out of an all-encompassing experience. Writing tries to bring order and sense and logic and description and familiarity and emotional inclusion, to any striking event in our lives. The other creative arts do the same thing. A photographer tries to capture the emotion, the beauty, the total awesomeness of one single moment. The same can be said for the works of an artist, a musician, a film maker or a dancer. The creative arts try to translate life, so that the precious moments are not forgotten. There is an argument that the minute you pin a description or a meaning or a perspective on to an experience or on to an object, you have lost the essence of just experiencing it. You have limited your experience. You have diminished the object. That may be the case, but there is still great satisfaction in trying to cage in any happening, with emotional description (which is what I think, creativity really is). The creative product is the leftover heavy pebbles, as the constant movement, of the stream of change, moves forward rapidly into the distant unknown. As travelers, we can pick up the pebbles and have a remembrance of where we have been, what we have felt. We get a small glimpse, of a standstill of one moment, of any one experience. We get to pick up a pebble, put it in our pocket, and thus, we get to keep a tiny sliver of any one particular major (or minor) experience, on our person, forever.

I’m Not Creative

One of the biggest fallacies people think is, “I’m not a creative person.”  That is just not the truth.  We are all creative.  By definition, we are creation and we are co-creating to make this current world that we live in.  People think creative people are just the artists or the musicians or the poets.  But isn’t designing a car or coming up with a new scientific theorem or looking at a math problem at a different angle creative?  On a micro-level, we are all creating our own individual lives.  We don’t like to think like this because it forces a true level of self awareness.  Life isn’t just “happening” to us.  Yes, there are some forces outside of our control, but how we react to those forces is all on us.

I think what is good about the big “crossroads” moments in our lives, when the big changes happen, is that this self awareness of how much we do to create the lives that we live, really comes into focus.  I read once that we should look at ourselves as our own life managers.  How is your life manager doing?  Would you give her a raise?  Would you want to fire him?  We create our lives from the minute we wake up to the moments we go to bed.  The morning rituals that we have, whether we drink coffee or read the paper or hit the snooze button ten times are all of our own creations.  What we do all day, how we react to people and situations, what we wear, how we decorate our living spaces are all of our own creations.  The neighborhoods we choose to live in, the schools we send our kids to, how we interact with our kids and our spouses and our friends and our pets, again are our own daily creations.   The foods we choose to cook and eat and nourish our bodies with are our choices and thus, our life creation.  Finally, how many pillows we choose to sleep with, who we choose to sleep with, what temperature we set the thermostat to when we fall asleep is part of our life’s creation.

I’m currently reading a book/workbook called Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel.  Ms. Birsel owns a design firm and has designed/redesigned all sorts of everyday items down to a toilet seat that she claims is the most comfortable toilet seat in the world!   She says that most designing is really just redesigning.  In the book, Ms. Birsel talks about the fact that to redesign something you have to break it down to its smallest component parts and then build it back up to a better design that better fits your current lifestyle.  You can only reconstruct when you deconstruct.  So, to deconstruct your life, you have to look at each component that makes up your daily experience.  Family, Work, Friends, Hobbies, Interests, Health, etc. are all smaller components of what is comprising the totality of our lives.  When you break your life down to these smaller parts, you can then look at the individual parts and think to yourself, “What’s working for me in this part of my life?   What are small creative changes that I could make here that would make a difference in making my whole life more fulfilling?”

There are so many distractions in today’s world.  It can be very confusing to understand what is best for yourself.  I recently watched a movie called Ingrid Goes West.  The heroine of the movie is Ingrid and she has absolutely no self concept.  She stalks “internet celebrities” and tries to become them in order to get people to like her.  Obviously, this plan backfires on her, but in the end, when she is totally alone and has no choice but to be authentically herself, acknowledging all of her own pain and fear, is when people reach out to her and truly relate to her and understand her.  I think most of us confuse “creative” with “authentic”.  We respond to people’s art or music or websites because we feel connected to the creator of the creation.  The people we call creative are just responding to the deepest part of themselves that just can’t help but come out.  It has to be shared because it feels like it is that person’s primal drive or need to create it for no other reason than the pure joy of creating it. We feel utterly inspired by seeing their creative process in action because deep down we know that we are creators, too.  How many times have we heard an amazing artist or musician or writer or actor or businessman say that while they appreciate the accolades and external validation, the truth is they would be doing whatever they are doing for free, by themselves, in the middle of the woods, because it is their passion, their need, their desire, their creation, their authentic life???

Variety is the spice of life.  I believe that with my whole heart.  Life would be so boring if we were all the same.  I think life would be even spicier if we let our varieties shine not just in big endeavors, but in the ways we choose to go about our daily habits.  We are all creative.  We are all creators and there is no better time than now to live our own authentic, true self lives every moment of every day.