Weekend reading: On Creating and Avoiding the Digital Quicksand.

This week I was thinking about a simple term: Creativity. A short introduction to thinking about it.

This week I was thinking about a simple term: Creativity.

I’m fascinated where thoughts come from. How do they come about? Why do they happen?

I’m intrigued by the motion of the mind, and how we can focus, hone in on thoughts, get distracted or dig deeper, uncovering new ideas, form new opinions, and sometimes, magically, come up with something new. New to us anyways.

Mark Twain said in his autobiography: “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

So maybe it’s not new after all. But it is new to us. And how do we get there? As a writer who several days per week sits down and tries to focus in on a single story and tries to create pages, thousands of words of “new” thought, I’m continually wondering how to best get to that state of mind. What is that state of mind? And when we tap into this place, why is it we can’t do it seemingly whenever we want… or perhaps we can and I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Over the years I’ve had a few ideas, as Twain said, not my own creation, but a collection of influences, that help me get there. One is I need time. I need an allotment of time that I know will be mine for the taking. There are times when I’ll dive into writing and get something accomplished quickly in a brief window - it almost feels like I’m being sneaky. The kids are here, sitting there on their phones or playing with the dog, El is in the kitchen cooking. The stereo is on. I have an idea. I scribble it quickly, but before I know it, I’m being asked to let the dog out, come help with such and such, look at this thing, and by the time I get back to sitting it is gone. These moments are still incredibly valuable, but there is no major work getting done in these brief windows. For large projects I need large amounts of dedicated and focused time. An hour is great. Two is better. Three is like winning the lottery.

For me, stepping into these times I have a few routines. I need to turn off the rest of the day. If there is something pressing at work or for work that needs to be done, I accomplish that first. I often will do a little exercise to get my blood flowing, some pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, or the like. Then I do the dishes. Something very calming happens when cleaning the kitchen. And when the kitchen, the most used room in our house, is clean, my mind feels at ease to do work, but it’s more than that. Doing the dishes warms up my hands and maybe it’s the sound of water running, but something puts my mind in the right space to create.

As I’m thinking about the word “creativity” I wonder what the world tells us it means. For myself it is an act of using our mind and hands to create or even, keeping Twains words in the background, uncover a new way of looking at something. Forming a thing out of the pieces in front of us, be it physical things, like paints and a paper, or mental scraps we’ve collected along our way, ideas and scene’s we’ve witnessed and we turn them into a new thing in our mind, then finding ways to communicate them into the physical dimension. Building a sculpture from clay and building a story out of ideas are not that different.

So in order to create we pull ideas out of our existence. We recall them. It’s an act of memory tied into the future. In a way, the act of creating is similar to how I’ve come to think of sleep. We’ve put all these inputs in our mind, but our mind needs time to process them, consider how it wants to approach them, what it thinks of the things we’ve encountered, and decide how to move forward. That is what sleep is for. To help our mind reset after a day of input. Giving ourselves time for a creative act, be it writing a page, or building a shelf, is time for our mind to use what is in front of it to produce and organize into something new, something that makes more sense, sometime needed, even if not by others, by ourselves.

When you look up “creativity” on Wikipedia it says “Creativity is a characteristic of someone or some process that forms something new and valuable.” A tendency I think many people have is to think that the thing created needs be valuable to many people or in economic terms in order to have been successful. But I think it more rational to think again in terms of sleep. Sleep is valuable first and foremost to ourselves. Yes, it will make us more capable to interact with society if we are well rested and healthy, but first and foremost it is an act that we need for ourselves. Creating is similar. Our minds need time to put things together, and different people have different forms of doing that. Some of the most creative people I know are builders, tradesmen, craftsmen, and the like. They would never consider themselves “artists” let alone “creative” but they create none the less. Creating is inherently human. It does not require horned rimmed glasses, a smug outlook, and strange cloths.

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” - Theodore Roosevelt.

And the trap of the mind is that it always wants to compare, how much I’ve done vs how much they have done. This of course is a dangerous question far beyond the thought of creativity, but is especially pertinent here. We should only compare ourselves to ourselves, because ultimately that is the only person we truly know about. When it comes to what we create, do we even care if it is “better?” We certainly don’t need to. For some of us there are goals. I’d like to publish books. I’d love to see some of the movies I’ve written come to fruition and watch them on my television. But ultimately I’ve come to peace with the fact that for me it is the act of creating I enjoy and find satisfaction in. Putting ideas on a page is the purpose. It leads to mental clarity. I find physical pleasure in the written word and go about the rest of my day with more satisfaction after I’ve written. It’s like sleep; I feel better for it.

“The main reason to produce something everyday is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the great stuff. To let it all go easily you need to be convinced that there is more where that came from. You get that in steady production.” - Kevin Kelly.

Like any other part of our body, the more you use it, the better at it you become. There is the 10K hour theory (which I’ve never actually read about, but heard referred to enough I feel comfortable referring to it) which seems to suggest the same thing. You do a thing enough and you will become proficient at it. It is in part why I resumed this habit of keeping a weekly newsletter/blog (I still love the term “blog.”) - It is to push myself into a form of writing I would not otherwise be doing and to get comfortable with sharing it with people. It is the goal of trying to find a connection between my mental kaleidoscope and people and society I live among.

It also generates mental momentum as I lean into words. It’s practice. And an attempt to hone in my skills.

I love other forms of creating too, but have found writing & photography to be the two I lean into the hardest, the two I find the most natural ability to act within. I love playing a guitar and the piano. I find building things terribly fun. But in those things I’ve never found the flow I find in words. But I’ll tackle them none the less, partly for the fun, and partly for the challenge.

So why creativity? Creativity is a method of exploration. It is a way of looking at the pieces of the world and putting them into an image of how we view it to better understand it. “We live in an age when you say casually to somebody ‘what’s the story on that?’ and they run to a computer and tell you in five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.” - Tom Waits.

Creativity is exploration of the wonder.

It’s putting pieces of a puzzle together and when the puzzle is finished we have a picture of something we hadn’t seen before. Even if it’s not new, it’s new to us. It’s a new way of looking at the thing. We are told that there are two parts of our brain, and that some people have a better ability to “be creative” because they use this or that part of the brain better. Nonsense I say. Short of brain injury we all have those same two haves, and we all have the same potential to tap into them. We may instinctually lean toward certain avenues of thought, but the potential exists in everyone to look at the world however they would like. Whether or not they even want to pursue new ways of looking at things, new ways of putting things together is up for discussion, but the potential exists across the board. It’s sad when you hear teachers and parents of young kids tell them they are more or less creative than others. In saying it out loud they are reinforcing this notion that creativity is limited to certain individuals and ways of thinking, and that it is defined by this or that some have it, some don’t. Everyone has the potential to create something.

Creativity is not a single thing. It is a way of thinking, but it has no specifics. My creative act later today may be building a shelf where one did not exist. It may seem like nothing to everyone else on earth, and in fact no one will likely even know about it, but it is still an act of creation, assembling something new, learning to fit the things together, and make useful a thing from other things that did not make up that thing before I started.

So what is the digital quicksand? I put that in the title of this before even thinking about it. I just wrote it. Where did the words come from?

I struggle daily with the influence of the digital world.  As someone that spends a lot of time alone (and I mean a lot) I enjoy being online for the few connections that occur there. But there is so much wasted time and thought that occurs in that realm, so much negativity that happens online. It’s a mental quagmire. Even when you are seeking out a few specific people, trying to just tap into a few conversations and stories, the shit of the internet eventually catches up to you, or it does it me anyways. And with this in mind I try to only view the digital sphere as I do bad television. Brainless entertainment limited to when I’m too tired to do much else. Because for me, the digital sphere is a creativity killer. In part it is because it is a time killer, but it’s not just the time, it is the negativity that occurs there.

I like to clean the kitchen before I write, because having a clean house where things are minimally scattered, even visually, creates a brain space that is also less cluttered. For this reason I approach the online world with trepidation. In the digital world negativity and clutter rule the conversation and the atmosphere. And in the time suck, there is less room for boredom. I’m a firm believer in boredom. When I have time to kill and I don’t allow others to fill it for me, that is when I will sit down and make something happen. I’ll begin forming ideas. I’ll begin to work with words or images or music or wood scraps in the garage. Time and free mental space are needed. If others, in the form of online input, are constantly barraging our minds, we will not have time to create thoughts for ourselves. I’ve never been someone that likes letting others do all my thinking for me.

I didn’t really know where I wanted to go with these words today. The term “creativity” was in my mind since writing last weeks piece as a word I wanted to dive into. I’m not sure I’ve even successfully scratched the surface, but maybe I’ll think of this as a mere introduction to the idea of thinking about Creativity. Maybe this is just a first paragraph of the thought.

I sat down and was looking through some old journals. I keep quotes I collect along the way in the first few pages of all my journals, for easy referencing. Last year’s summer journal had all the quotes above and I noticed they fit a theme. But as I looked at the title I still don’t know why I wrote about Quicksand, but the word wanted to stay. I think it is reminder to myself, if to no one else, of the heavy distraction the digital world plays to our time and thus our creativity. And then, just as I get HERE, a friend sends me a message with this quote:

“Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism. The odds of a bad news story of fraud, a corruption, a disaster occurring in your local town at any given moment is low.  When you expand your attention nationally, the odds increase. When they expand globally, the odds of something terrible happening in any given moment are 100 percent.” - Morgan Housel

This is something my friend and I have talked a lot about, though not necessarily with regards to creativity. We’ve discussed this exact phenomenon about how people are stressed over events that never in human history would have stressed them, because the access we have to tragedy is incessant and unrelenting online, a thing for which we humans have not evolved.

But here is where it ties together for me. The number one killer of creativity for me is this digital world. It makes my thoughts scattered and disrupted. It’s like a messy house, but negative, not just messy. There is so much negative there, we can easily slip into thinking the world is full of dread. Dread is a creativity killer. Stress is a killer.  It’s why exercise and sleep are equally important for a creative life. We can not be in a constant state of production, even when we want to. We need to rest, step away, look at trees, listen to birds, put ideas together.

And we can certainly use creativity as a tool for overcoming stress, but why would we ever consciously choose to add more stress than necessary to our lives. That is not what we should be looking to add to our lives. Life on earth has more opportunity than it has ever had in history. It is a fact that fewer people suffering natural disasters than ever, even though the news would lead you think otherwise.

And the worst part is the volume of negative. We aren’t evolved for this volume of news, let alone negative news. We are meant not to be viewing the world through digital screens, but to be up and out and moving through space and time in a physical way.

Getting up and out in the world, interacting with people face to face, interacting with trees and parks, and even the cities we live in, walking among the towering buildings and laughs of kids across the street, these are the places our bodies and minds evolved to live and to create. Creating new things is like a gateway to perspective. We can literally create from physical to abstract.

A garden, to a better day.  As we organize the random pieces into a beautiful kaleidoscope view we not only have a better view of the world, but a better interaction with it. Creativity can take any form we want it to, but I really think it is ingrained in our DNA to move forward through life creating on some level, even if just for ourselves.

Thanks for bearing with me as I sift through some random pieces of the kaleidoscope. It’s been warm in Missoula this week with fog and mixed skies, but Chris Tomer says we have more winter coming, so I’m optimistic for more snow. And there was a very nice moon rise tonight. I’ve included a few photos of the clouds from this week.