Creativity and Balance during Quarantine

“As one grows older, one sees the impossibility of imposing your will on the chaos with brute force. But if you’re patient, there may come that moment when while eating an apple, the solution presents itself politely and says, ‘Here I am.’ ”—Albert Einstein

As someone who loves to feel productive every day and keeps the calendar full, I am trying to learn how to change my pace. Like most of you, I am sheltering in place and slowing down in order to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We, as a society, have forgotten how to be still, and yet this is an essential skill to allow ideas to come. Have you noticed how many people have had time to make things and post their creativity to the internet lately? Songs, poems, and hundreds of people dressing up to recreate masterpieces from Art History, whimsical memes, and Rube’s Goldberg machines. But these are also days to invite ideas that can change your life or change the world.

This isn’t the world's first pandemic, so it’s not the world’s first quarantine. Schools across England closed during the plague of 1665, including Trinity College in Cambridge, who's student, Isaac Newton, was sent home along with his peers. It was at home, not at school, where he played with prisms, invented calculus, and discovered gravity! Six decades before that, the bubonic plague caused businesses, including the theatre shut down. That's when many believe Shakespeare wrote King Lear. 

a view from one of my neighborhood walks

There’s a difference between down time and wasted time. My friend, Fernando, who was a native of Peru, explained it this way, “In North America we spend our time. In South America we take our time.”  Wreck-less spending of money depletes your bank account; unbridled spending of time depletes your soul. 

Here’s what I'm seeing now that people are able to take their time:  The lawns in my neighborhood are better manicured. People are planting and weeding gardens. People are making meals and baking from scratch. They are getting outside to take daily walks, talking with their family around a fire pit. Gardening, cooking, walking, family bonding: these are activities that should be done every day for basic mental and physical upkeep, not just when a government official tells us to “shelter in place.” The life we are used to living is so out of balanced that a granola bar for dinner on the dash between math club and soccer practice and a monthly walk around the block seems normal. If we can’t learn to maintain some sort of balance after the quarantine, we will have wasted a golden opportunity. If we can’t slow ourselves down, something else will happen to slow us down. (My dad calls that “forced relaxation.”)

Breaks are built into the day at companies like 3M so that employees can get ideas, which is why they have 55,000 products: more than one for every two employees! Slowing down allows you to find solutions that you won’t be found until you can clear your head of all piles of information getting in the way. We must never be lazy about thinking, really hard thinking is like doing the hard pedaling to get your bike to the top of a hill. When we sit back and empty ourselves of assumptions and pre-mature conclusions, new thoughts surface and we gain ground like we’re coasting downhill. Some of those new ideas are bound to be really good ideas, inspired even. It is in the stillness that inspiration comes, you can't force it. So do some yoga, eat an apple, take a walk, and take your time.

Creativity Part 1

Last month, I spent a couple weeks teaching part of a Master's of Education class on creativity. I had my wonderful, adult students, working on collaborative art projects, going on visual scavenger hunts with iPads, creating dance moves to represent and sequence parts of a day or event, and visually interpreting contrasting pieces of music. It is a treat for me to hear fellow teachers of children tell me that I've given them something they will use to engage their students and teach the curriculum.
We live in a time when creative thinking is crucial in solving the enormous problems in government, the environment, industry, and complicated family lives. Today's students need to know how to see situations with new eyes and find answers to the big questions and seemingly insurmountable dilemmas in their future. They can learn creative problem solving skills through unstructured play, hands on activities, experimentation, exploration of the natural world, and the arts. We do students a great disservice when we base our classes around high stakes multiple choice tests and worksheets where only one answer is accepted. They need to find possibilities that have not yet been imagined. We all do.
As a special education art teacher, I find myself having to find answers for every student's unique set of disabilities. Throughout my day, I ask myself:  How can I teach observational drawing to an elementary student who is completely blind? How do I have a discussion with a child who has autism and is non-verbal? How can I help a student with cerebral palsy to hold a pencil? How do I invite cooperation from an angry high school student who is refusing to work?  We all have our daily challenges, which turn into daily victories when we play with possibilities and seek inspiration from wherever we can find it.
When my oldest son was eight, we visited an art exhibition and I asked him where he thought artists got their ideas. "Artists get their ideas from everywhere. From the world around them," he said. He was right. The best ideas come from outside oneself. A single paragraph from from a novel, (about music being recognized as a written language by a passenger on a train), was the jumping off point for my husband to make more than a decade's worth of collages, prints, and paintings. The computer mouse is inspired by roll-on deodorant. Inspiration can come from unlikely sources.
In Elizabeth Gilbert's popular Ted Talk, "Your Elusive Creative Genius" she talks about ancient Greece and Rome, when people believed that divine spirits came to offer creativity. She said, "The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons. Socrates, famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar."
"So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame," she said.
In the Middle Ages, the idea that the individual human was the center of creativity came to be accepted. 
"And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error," Gilbert continued, "I think that allowing somebody one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smudge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just complete warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance."

Twenty years ago, Baltimore based artist, Claudia Matzko, explained a concept to Ohio State graduate students, that sounded even more cosmic than she would have liked it to sound, none the less, it was this:  There are ideas floating around, and it's your job as an artist to catch one. If you don't catch it, someone else will.
As writers, it's not such an "out there" idea. Plenty of us have had brilliant and original book ideas only to find someone else beat us to the publisher with the same idea. My brother was a little kid, freezing chocolate pudding into ice cube trays with toothpicks for handles, to sell to neighborhood friends years before Jell-o started selling pudding pops. Maybe ideas, answers, inventions, and melodies are just hanging in the universe waiting for an artist, waiting for anyone to notice. And it is up to each of us to catch the ideas and do something with them to make the world better and our lives more interesting. 
We also have to allow our children to engage in creative play and seek inspiration. We must offer them problems with opened ended solutions, and model how to think through possibilities. But before we model for others, we must learn to do those things ourselves. Play. Ponder. Listen to your muses. Catch some ideas and make something unique!