A new domain of psychical expansion, that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it…
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs
A new domain of psychical expansion, that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it…
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
When I was 14, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I sketched some designs (which I thought were marvelous), and sent them off to a design contest that was advertised in the back of my Teen magazine. I never heard from them, and therefore I decided that I must not have any talent for design. In the meantime, my mother consistently claimed that she wasn’t creative, and I presumed that creativity must not run in my family. I gave up my dreams of design and graduated from college with a “sensible” degree in Computer Science.
Thirty years later, I’m finding myself fascinated by Project Runway—a reality tv show where fashion designers compete with one another, creating complete new outfits under challenging circumstances. I’ve seen every episode in every country (except the Philippines—I gave that up when it was too difficult to follow the language). It’s always inspiring to watch their creative process at work, but my favorite episodes are the ones when the designers have to make clothes out of unusual materials—trash, food, and recycled building materials.
In On Becoming a Person, the celebrated psychologist Carl Rogers wrote that one important condition for creativity was “the ability to toy with elements and concepts.” In other words, the ability to play spontaneously with ideas, colors, shapes, and relationships, juggling elements into “impossible juxtapositions,” shaping “wild hypotheses, expressing the ridiculous.” (Making a fun, wearable dress out of chard and cabbage leaves probably falls into that category.) Playing with impossible combinations is the root of creative thought and experience.
The other thing that inspires me are the designers on the show who aren’t afraid to take risks; who stay true to their inner visions and put them out there, regardless of what the judges might think. Sometimes their visions don’t work out and they are booted off the show, but thankfully, the designers who play it safe are more likely to be cut first. Watching the designers’ struggles and triumphs is heartening. When something is creative, it is by definition something that we haven’t seen before. How scary to put it out there! After all, it may get laughed at.
On “The Fashion Show,” another reality show about fashion design, James Paul Ancheta, a cutting-edge designer who made it to the finale said this: “You can spend the rest of your life making pretty clothes; you can spend the rest of your life making saleable clothes. But you have one chance to put your voice out there, and have it be heard.”
Bravo.
In the past two months, I’ve started three separate support groups. Two are work-related, having to do with marketing and book promotion. The third is a small group of friends to support our creative process (we commit to daily writing and weekly artist dates.) All three groups have been amazing, helpful, and instructive. I’m really starting to understand more clearly that in order to help myself, what I really need to do is help other people. It feels good, it’s more fun, and it works! When I make a commitment to my group that I will do some particular thing, I nearly always keep the commitment. But most of all, working together with other people makes me feel like I’m not alone. All I need to do is help someone else, and I’m helping myself as well. I sometimes wonder why I ever struggled through anything by myself. It’s just not necessary.
My support group experiences remind me of a favorite passage from one of Anne Lamott’s books, Bird by Bird. Lamott teaches writing classes, and after one class ended, four students started their own writing group. She writes about them:
They end up giving the new students rousing pep talks about how great it is to be part of a writing group, how much they’ve come to care for one another, how it helps them get their work done. They’ve gone from being four tense, slightly conceited, lonely people who wanted to write to one of those weird little families we fashion out of whoever’s around us. They’re very tender with one another. They all look a lot less slick and cool than they did when they were in my class, because helping each other has made their hearts get bigger. A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through. You can see this pulse in them now.
Love those lines: “They all look a lot less slick and cool than they did when they were in my class, because helping each other has made their hearts get bigger. A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide.”
I don’t know if my own heart has gotten bigger, but I’d like to think so.
My brother-in-law is a big fan of Goethe (full name: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.) By the way, I just discovered that the proper German pronunciation of his name is “Goo-t’h.” (Don’t feel bad—apparently his name was a challenge for people to pronounce back in his own day, as well.) In any case, every time I’m at my sister’s house I come across another interesting book about Goethe. In this current one, Love, Life, Goethe, the author John Armstrong writes about Goethe’s desire for balance between his inner life and his outer life:
“[Goethe’s] thoughts and feelings seek external manifestation: the inner is to become the outer. And through externalization, his inner states will—hopefully—lose their fleeting, private and capricious character and be made precise, ordered and available to others.”
“…each is diminished when pursued alone. The urge to communicate what is going on ‘inside’ becomes a boring egoism, unless what is expressed is substantial and serious. On the other hand, exhaustive taking in—visiting all the famous places, reading everything—is a sterile occupation unless what is absorbed becomes personally enriching.”
When self-expression is over-emphasized, the “quality” of the self being expressed is not given enough consideration, yet when learning and scholarship are overemphasized, not enough attention is paid to what he calls “inner transformation.”
As someone who is both an educator and a creative, I’ve experienced both of these polarities, and I can see these polarities in others, as well as in our educational institutions. The defacto system that operates in today’s world is that we are considered to be “learners” for our first 22 (or-so) years, and then we “graduate,” becoming fully-functioning adults capable of “expressing” ourselves in the world. In truth, adult life requires a balance between the two—sometimes we are learners, taking in the world; other times we are involved in sharing our learnings and creative products with others. In Getting Messy, I use the word “teaching” to refer to Goethe’s outer, self-expressive mode. When we are involved in expressing ourselves to the larger world, we are teaching. In a healthy adult life, we shift back-and-forth between these two modes: sometimes learning, sometimes teaching. Healthy adults make this shift effortlessly.
Art does not come from thinking, but from responding.
Corita Kent