Creativity

I recently moved from a house to a small apartment in the city. I had to prioritize my routines. Routines necessary for my health maintenance were first in line: Up at an early hour, yoga, medications, breakfast, going to the gym. These essentials were modified minimally while I was packing, unpacking and organizing on both ends of the move.

The process had an impact on my writing. The basic variable was one of time. I have come to understand that I need a lot of time to produce writing which I consider worthy of being shared with others. That time isn't always spent in front of a monitor at my desk, by any means. The time that was missing while I was moving was my time for walking in the woods or on the beach. It was the time I spend writing long emails to friends with whom I regularly correspond. And, it was the time I routinely spend reading on the Web and in print.

As I grow older, I am very impatient about and careful with my time. This comes with the daily mindfulness that my window of existence is closing and could slam shut at any moment. My creativity flows from the conscious use of my time to stimulate a creative response in my brain. I call it "playing with my brain".

The impatience about wasting my time becomes a problem in some relationships. I used to suffer fools gladly. My work for many years entailed spending time trying to decode the garbled thinking and impaired communication of mentally ill and impaired people. This builds personal habits, which I have been trying to unlearn for over a decade. Those habits were a major impedance to my creative process for many years, despite the fact the work which developed them provides me still with grist for my stories and poetry.

Entering relationships for me now requires quickly assessing the worth of each relationship in terms of my creative process and my need to maintain my vitality in order to be creative. This is a challenge to my precept of generosity of spirit: I have tried for decades to be open to everyone I meet and their needs, as part of my humanist practice, born out of my Buddhist studies. The by-product of this struggle has been an increased skill and creativity in developing the relationships in my life which enhance my creativity. Those people who obstruct my creativity by wasting my time get less of it.

So, my creative process does not exclusively entail externalizing ideas and emotions into art. It also entails sculpting my own daily human experience into an artful being. The synthesis of these two processes is very powerful. To live creativity, as a mindful person, brings a value and spontaneity to writing, drawing and movement which surpasses intellectual art. Every fiber of the day becomes a piece of the work.

This recent move has brought a realization that I have made progress in this process. While I found that my routines were disrupted and impacted my output of written work. I also found that my new and old routines easily melded into functional and creative days, in which I accomplished quite a lot without being overwhelmed or hypercritical of myself for not doing more.

The result is an appreciation of what is and who I am. This is a creative, living place in each moment from which to move through space and time. What is simply is. I am there in the moment to use whatever it is in a creative and positive way to the best of my ability. I believe this is the core of being creative and of simply being, in a mindful and compassionate way.

Texting

I recently had an experience which baffled me. An old friend posted a comment on my first essay for The New Humanism, a journal of the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. She was good enough to email me to alert me to her dissatisfaction with the comment on retrospection. When I read the comment, I was stunned. It didn't read at all like her, as I have known her for about 25 yrs..

The comment has been removed with her consent. I have processed my initial feelings of disappointment and anger at the glibness of the comment in the context of a journal, which I highly respect as a serious forum for Humanism. The whole experience has made me think quite a bit.

It seems we are all becoming sloppy with our speech in print. That is, with texting and Facebook-ing day in and day out, our communication is becoming too immediate and uninhibited in general. This is one of very few situations which have effected me in this way, but I hear stories quite regularly in media about cyber-bullying and bad communication in new media. More contact, less quality. I feel the pull of it, the challenge to be who I am with one line.

My own style of writing is frequently criticized in on line situations. I have been told I am too formal, too stuffy, cold, too intellectual, too uptight, etc.. I have stopped frequenting chatroom situations because of this and have no intention of embracing Twitter.

There are reasons why I write as I do. I began my schooling with severe dyslexia in a Roman Catholic school in 1955, when Catholic nuns saw dyslexia as a sign of the devil. I spent many hours crying in a closed coat closet at the back of my first grade classroom. This unintentionally Skinnerian method scared me into reading from left to right eventually. I learned to slow down and ignore the mockery of my classmates as I picked through the words through restrained sobs.

Later on, I had two pen pals. One in Australia and one in France. They were wonderfully encouraging tutors. The girl in Australia, who planned to be a nurse, gave me my first compliment as a writer. She wrote that she waited every week for my letters and saved them to read at night before she went to sleep. My French correspondent, who wrote to me to learn English, gave me confidence by allowing me to explain English idioms to him and coach his study of my language. Since I was useless at French, this was a true gift: I learned that I could communicate intelligently with someone in another culture without having to be discouraged by my deficiency in their language.

My pre-medical course in college was grueling for me. It was a bad fit, but my parents urged me on for their sake. In my sophomore year, I desperately wanted to be an English Literature major. I was immature and seventeen. I allowed myself to be talked out of it by my parents. My English Literature professor at the time became quite upset and ignored me for the rest of the time I was at that campus. In a strange way, I took his anger as a compliment.

The years have given birth to a series of personal journals with diary entries, poetry and short stories. I am a writer. I have been since an early age, but I have only been able to say that I am a writer with confidence for the last several years.

Now I find writing is becoming casual speech, and casual speech is corrupting writing, in my opinion.

I know I am definitely not the first 60-year-old who has felt like a stranger on a strange planet. But, I am not happy or comfortable feeling that way. I want to be in tempo with the Zeitgeist. I try to maintain an interest in expanding and changing technologies.

I guess I have found a boundary which I do not wish to cross. 'It's all good' has never been my slogan, because it isn't all good. Some of it is pretty awful. I will continue practicing considered, honest and mindful speech to the best of my ability. Whether by mouth or by keyboard. It is who I want to be and who I continue to try to become.

Writing

Writing has been an important activity in my life. I write lists, which are crucial in my efforts to remain productive and organized. I write ideas down as they come, if I'm near paper and pen. I haven't entered the realm of the Blackberry. I have written 5 novels and scores of short stories and essays. I've written poetry, but I will be the first to admit it is not my form. The process of writing, of externalizing feelings and ideas, is uniquely human behavior. I believe a person's level of maturity is easily discerned in his/her writing. Yet, writing is in balance with experience in my world. Sometimes my need to experience life, mundane as it is most of the time for me, supersedes my need or capacity to write. I am confident I will return to writing when this happens. Writing has become a part of my practice. Through it, I often return to mindfulness from a place of distraction.