I’m taking a break from writing an essay this week. I spent my Monday evening gathering my thoughts and organizing my notes a little more fully, continuing what I began last week.
Read moreWhy Flow and Creativity Matter: the arts of attention and saving ourselves from political-ecological collapse
As of today, I have typed up 36 of my 50 pages of notes that I accumulated beginning about a year ago. My goal for this year was to catch up to all the reading, thinking, and exploration that I had done related to playing the Feelings Collector. As it stands, I am on track to just about make it across the finish line, if I can stay disciplined and write every week. As it also happens, this week represents a threshold of sorts, where I have now arrived at a subheading in my notes that I have called “connections between the teachers and big take-aways.” Not a very snappy title, but it’s what I’ve got, and, for better or for worse, it captures the essence of what remains to do for this part of my project this year.
Read moreFeeling more creative, part 2: Life-systems for creativity
As I have sought to invite the feeling of creativity into my life this year, I have encountered a lot of advice on “how to be more creative.” In truth, I have been reading such advice for years now, typically in the search for enhanced “productivity,” which I as an overwhelmed graduate student saw as a panacea to all my ills. In fact, there is a great deal of overlap between creativity and productivity advice. There are good reasons for this, but they are a bit beyond the scope here.
Read moreFeeling more creative, part 1: The role of rest
I wrote recently about different models of the creative process and how remarkably similar they all are. One of the most important similarities among them is the importance of rest in the process. On the surface, it seems obvious: generating novelty, like many other activities, is easiest when well-rested. But at a deeper level, creative insights appear to be born from idleness.
Read moreModeling The Creative Process, Part 2: The Rock Tumbler
As I wrote last week, James Webb Young once described the creative process as using the “production line of the mind” to generate ideas. This metaphor for the creative process is useful because it specifies a mental technique that can be learned. The technique is not esoteric, mysterious, or romantic, but rather consists of a few simple principles and methods that you can train yourself to use in your daily life. Young’s enduring insight is that the “production line of the mind” is the source of all ideas.
Read more