Here's a little quiz.
Have you ever been interested in:
1) Exploring that mysterious space between what is and what could be?
2) Reading between the lines of a book to find hidden meanings?
3) Listening fully, taking in not just what someone says but
how he or she says it and
why?
If you answered "yes" to at least one of the above questions, I'm certain we'd get along nicely. You and I would share this love of looking for the invisible among the visible and listening for the sounds that come from silence.
(And I'm certain we'd have a jolly good time doing it too.)
Now, I don't know where
your search for those underlying layers of perception may have taken you, but mine took me to the crazy world of acting. My absolute favorite part of theatre was the scene study work in preparation for the performances. I loved creating tension through subtext and found the potency of pause especially intriguing. I liked how acting called for players to "mine the text" (a.k.a. search the script) for clues to their characters' motives. I became more and more adept at detecting sinister motives among seemingly innocuous lines in a script, and the more clues I could find, the more interesting the scene turned out to be.
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my sister and me,
the one with the, ahem, lovely haircut. |
Given my enthusiasm for the space between the obvious, it should be no surprise that I'm equally fascinated by that developmental space between childhood and adulthood, whereby fantasies are replaced by responsibilities. Can you pinpoint, for example, that moment in time when you began tapering off your playful, imaginative games and instead began to focus solely on the serious business of "reality" (whatever that means.) I know personally that somewhere, somehow, I abandoned imagination for its own sake and replaced it with mental exercises that I could justify as useful, such as memorizing facts for a test.
My friend recently told me she could remember when things began to change during her childhood. She recalls starting seventh grade and realizing that she needed to fight the urge to play Barbies or house or anything make believe anymore lest her friends think she was silly and immature. And then she added with a sigh, "Yeah. I remember being pretty bummed about that."
I wonder, does this developmental stage between childhood years and, say, our teenage years into college act as a sort of Bermuda Triangle, sucking in our enthusiasm for fantasy play like a Black Hole? Is this why creative play seems to evaporate into thin air once we grow older?
Given the quest for better creativity in the workplace and the desperate need for innovating solutions to the world's critical issues, that space between could use a major renovation. Isn't it kind of absurd that we spend so much money to try to tap into our creativity as adults, when we were born to create and imagine and wonder and invent? It takes so much energy to rebuild the damage to our creative selves rather than construct a useful bridge between childhood play and adult engagement.
But the good news is that there are some simple solutions to bridge this gap. We are fortunate enough to have really good teachers to help us bridge this gap and they happen to be in great supply: children.
Now, I have two of my own little instructors, but everyone has neighbors or friends with kids. And perhaps you are lucky enough to be an aunt or uncle, cousin or grandparent to one or two of the little guys. If you listen closely to children they most likely ask a lot of "what if" questions.
For example, my kindergartner will often come up with "what if" scenarios. For example, he'll ask me something along the lines of, "Mama, what if the sky was full of baseballs and we had to hit every last one of them with a baseball bat to keep them from falling on the ground and and if some fall we could catch them with our hats but then when we were going to catch them we tripped and landed on our head but did a somersault in the air and, and and...." The scenario goes on and on.
Then there's my daughter, who doesn't even bother saying "what if." She just goes to her notebooks and creates places of what-if's and could-be's in her fantastical stories.
So what if you tried adding "what if" to your conversations? Your thought processes? Your problem solving? What in the world would happen?
I personally have no idea. Which is part of the fun of listening to creative impulses.
Because I'll bet something strange/silly/delicious/disastrous/brilliant/miraculous or absolutely preposterous might happen.
