Creating Meaning: The Artist’s Way

Colleen Blackard creates meaning in her life by creating the universe from the tip of a ball point pen.

Exploration: Embracing Distraction

Some people find A.D.D. to be an affliction, but I think of it as a life style to be embraced. Why does this work for me? I am an explorer. I create meaning in my life by charting new territories, this may mean hiking, kayaking, or surfing the web. One day I read Sartre, the next a textbook on biochemistry. In between it all I am developing maps from one place to the next and noting connections that may turn out to be of benefit.  Of course there is a balance to be struck between following new pathways and being totally scattered. Here are three questions to consider.

• Do you complete your projects? If your answer is no, then you may need to develop habits for noting areas to investigate. If you are not worried about losing a connection that occurs to you then you can return to your current activity right away and stay on it to completion.
• Do you spend most of your time context switching? Many people think they are multi-tasking when in reality there are always in-between tasks rather than making progress in any of them.
• Do you spend the first 10 minutes of each business meeting coming up to speed? This may be a hint that you have too many items on your plate at once, and you may be pulling your colleagues down. Only attend meetings where you are ready to add value on minute one.

If you find that you do complete projects and do add value in meetings and spend more time on task than not (even if the number of endeavors is high) then you may be managing the different threads of your life just fine. In this case you are a functioning trail blazer. If not, a few tricks of the trade can help you embrace your inner explorer.

Anti-Patterns: Choosing our behavior

In the last post I talked about removing habitual forms in our life, and the importance of awareness in spotting our ways as they arise. The point was to see the behavior we don’t want, and then actively pick a different action.

In pattern replacement the idea is to swap one pattern for another. Analyze the form that holds us back and create a new activity that achieves our goal. For example if you are trying to lose weight, look at your eating habits. Do you tend to eat lots of salty snacks? Do you drink soda at work? Do you have a mid evening snack of cookies and then a late night snack of ice cream? It can be very difficult to make the right choices at the moment of hunger.

Rather than stare down that pint of Haagen-Dazs at 10:30 pm, you can set yourself up for success at earlier points.

• Replace the early evening snack, with a fast paced early evening walk for thirty minutes. This will burn calories rather than ingest them. Further, exercise reduces the desire for snack food.
• Don’t buy the food you don’t want to eat, rather replace that buying pattern with a buying pattern that supports your goal. Buy fresh fruit, the kinds you really love, and will gladly eat. It is easier to beat a craving at the grocery store on Sunday morning than in the freezer on Thursday night.
• Soda at work breaks the cardinal rule; don’t drink your calories. Drink water or unsweetened ice tea. Diet soda has been linked to weight gain (Swithers & Davidson, Science Daily 2008)
• Replace late night television with sleep. It will boost your energy, enable more time to eat a good breakfast or get in a morning walk. If this means losing a show you don’t want to miss, invest in DVR.

As with Pattern Removal, Pattern Replacement is about choices. We have the power to change our own lives. Nobody else has can or will do it for you. Practice awareness, see your actions, own them, and make your wise choices.

Awareness and Pattern Removal

The key to removing patterns is awareness. We need to be able to recognize our behaviors as they occur. For instance if we feel that we are not good enough, we must see these feelings of inadequacy as they arise. One tool is to recognize the effects on your body. Does your face become flushed? Do your shoulders droop? Do you lower your gaze? Another device is developing the intent each morning to become aware of the moment that you fall into the pattern. A watchdog that barks at the right time can signal a need for a better choice.

Book Review: Existentialism is a humanism

A great book by Jean-Paul Sartre that sums up how we make choices and create who we are. You make our your meanings. Quick read.

Between Things: Patterns and the Creative Mind

What is so hard about being creative? What obstacles get in our way? Well, one obstacle is that we limit our own creative spark by falling into habitual patterns. Last time I talked about the patterns created by our living spaces. Another example of one of these patterns in how we look at the world; how we actually see it. A few years ago, while sitting in meditation looking out at a large Maple tree outside my window, I started noticing the leaves more deeply. I noticed their shape replicated over and over a gain. Each had veins that were visible in the sunlight. After a few minutes of meditative breathing the shape of the blue sky between the clusters of leaves garnered my attention. Rather than discuss my personal observations, I prefer to help you have your own direct experience. Try the following exercise.

• Go outside and sit where you can observe a tree from a close enough distance to see individual leaves and yet far enough away that you can see the whole tree.
• Sit comfortably (so that you can maintain your position for 15 minutes) with your back straight in view of the tree.
• Breathe in and out naturally through your nose with your mouth closed. Feel yourself relax as you breathe.
• Bring your gaze comfortably to the tree.
• Observe the individual leaves, their movements, their shapes. What do you notice about the leaves? How do they change over time?
• Observe the spaces, the larger gaps between clumps of leaves. What do you notices about the spaces? How to the spaces change over time?
  

I won’t get specific about what I observed in the above exercise but I will comment that there are differences in the way we perceive "things" or objects, and how we perceive the "space" between things. We, in our society at least, have acquired the habit of dividing the world into discrete objects which are separated by boundaries and distances.

How does this habit limit our creativity? By limiting our modes of perception, pinned down by habitual concepts we reduce the variety of perception of the way things are. For instance you and I perceive water as something to drink or something to wash with. However a fish perceives the water as home and as something to breathe. By allowing both perceptions the artist can discover whole new ways to create, whole new subjects to explore.

The Impressionists painted light because they trained themselves to not just see the light on the objects but also to see light as the object. That is they trained themselves to not differentiate between a flower and the light that was striking the flower. With this relaxation of a specific pattern of seeing, they created an entire artistic movement called Impressionism.

For centuries, musicians saw music as a series of notes played on a musical instrument separated by spaces called "rests." In one way a rest was seen as an object because it was indicated in a score by a symbol rather than by distance between notes. However there was a definite bias between notes and rests because musicians really saw the rests as pauses between the music. All songs were composed mainly by notes in rhythmic durations with an occasional rest to make non rhythmic spaces. In 1952 John Cage composed 4' 33'' which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of a musician not playing an instrument. This piece actually has three movements but in total there are no notes played. Although one might see this as an experiment in silence it might just as well be an experiment in environmental music where the background noise is the music; either way, a new concept in composing and a new way of perceiving music was inaugurated.

How can we break out of our habitual patterns of perception? More on that next time.

Rectangular Living: On Being Curvaceous

We live in rectangles. We live in our rectangular houses, we enter and exist these houses through doors, and we look in or out of our houses through windows. When we leave the house we walk our towns and our cities which are increasingly rectangular, from the village square to the shopping malls. Our movie theaters are the same shape and we watch our films on rectangular screens. It could be argued that our cars are not rectangular but more like "round-tangles," but this is really a small argument on the limits of creating actual right angles, and again the automobiles have windows and mirrors which shape and curtail our view.

If you are reading this article, then chances are, you are reading it via a rectangle. A web page displayed on a desktop monitor, or a laptop, possibly via a PDA, cell phone, or Kindle, or (horror of horrors), via the printed page. More and more of our lives are altered by viewing the world through windows, rather than direct experience with an odd shaped universe. In 1946, we received our first view of the earth from space and then in the Sixties we received our first views of the earth from the moon, which showed the earth to be round (ok, roundish). Of course, we knew that long before but here were the images to prove it. Those rectangular images, however, were in rectangular newspapers and on rectangular televisions. Our planet and our moon have right no angles, but our experiences of them do.

A while ago, I decided to replace the habit of rectangular living with the habit of being curvaceous. If one looks at the human body it is filled with nothing but bulbous lumps of flesh which when viewed from some distance may attract or repulse but which are all remarkably similar in the end. If you have read anything on the nature of fractals, then ones view of the universe may be more jaggy than curvaceous, but this is really a matter of scale and the anti-aliasing effects (think smoothing), of the human visual system. Either way, jaggy or smooth, the universe is not cut up into rectangles and limited by edges of view.

Here are a few tips on being curvaceous:

• Take a walk in the morning before reading the paper, surfing the net, or watching television. Notice the structure of trees, the structure of leaves, the structure of insects, birds, squirrels, and dogs. Look up and notice the shape of clouds. Are they wispy or puffy? Any right Angles?
•  Hold a piece of fruit in your hand. Or hold a vegetable . Feel the smoothness of the skin, the curve of it's form.
• Look out through the window into the yard. What do you notice, what do you see? Now walk out the door in the same direction and experience that space directly. What do you see now? What do you smell? What do you feel? This is a more direct experience of the way your yard really is. If you don't have a yard then do the same with your neighborhood. The point is to smell the world. Feel the world.
• Get the permission of a person in your life, trace the lines of their body with your hands. Gently squeeze their flesh and feel how their body reshapes itself in response to interaction with your body.
• Go swimming in the ocean or a large lake, is the surface of the water flat when the waves are over your head?
• Find a large tree and close your eyes while feeling the bark. Gently wrap your arms around the tree and let your face rest against the bark. Smell the tree.

Being curvaceous is not about having a more shapely sexy body, it is about awareness. It is about experiencing the non-rectangular world and building the habit of being aware of how things are.