“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings…creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
Learning & Creative Process
Creativity Lessons from Top Chef
I adore Top Chef. I have no idea what fois gras is or why anyone would want to eat a meal of molecular gastronomy, but regardless, I think the show offers some very helpful tips for any creative genre. (Beside, where else can one hear such phrases as “exhibit balance” and “show restraint”?) Here are this season’s lessons:
- You may deconstruct a traditional dish (and get kudos for doing so), but make sure all the components go together. The dish needs to “make sense.”
- Show restraint, but not so much restraint that you bore people.
- Never, never do something that confuses the dish.
- The flavor should be rich without being overpowering.
- Don’t let the star be lost in the dish—the lesser actors must not compete with the primary attraction.
- Don’t over-season your food, but God forbid, never, NEVER under-season. Err on the side of too much, rather than too little.
- Your confidence must come through in the dish. If you can’t execute it properly, come up with something else that you can execute properly.
- On the other hand, in a group of individuals with boring dishes, your originality will win you points, and just might keep you safe for another week. In other words, best to keep coming up with new ideas.
Profound Vulnerability
Several years ago I attended a Christmas Eve church service where the female pastor (who was clearly a beginner) played Silent Night for the audience on her harp. I have never forgotten that moment, nor her profound vulnerability. The tenderness of it, risking our judgment and ridicule…
The educator Maxine Green said, “When we are most vulnerable, we are most alive. In our vulnerability is our power” and I have always loved that statement. Of course it would make sense, as well. There is something so beautiful about profound vulnerability.
May you find that place inside yourself.
Trusting Your Gut, Even When It Seems Crazy
A few years ago my intuition nudged me to give a class the assignment of writing a song. Only three students had musical ability (I came up with an alternate assignment for the others), and of those three students, only one young woman—Carmel Bracken, a workshop leader and educator from Ireland—was inspired to give it a try. She had never written a song before, and the song she produced still moves me to tears. It’s titled Dream This Dream With Me and you can listen to it here:
I’m offering this in case you feel inclined to ignore your quiet, whispering inner voice because whatever it’s saying doesn’t make sense or seems too outrageous or only one student in the class might grasp it. Creative expression, of whatever form, just needs an opening and the rest takes care of itself. If you are a teacher, trainer, coach, parent, mentor, or group facilitator, you have the opportunity to provide those openings for others. All you need to do is create the space for it.
Not Knowing Lies at the Core of Creativity
From Wislawa Szymborska‘s Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, December 7, 1996:
I value that little phrase “I don’t know” highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
I hope you’ve said “I don’t know” at least once today.