The Wild Garden of our Childhood

Take a moment before reading on and draw a picture of a person you love as best you can in 60 seconds. Then continue reading this blog.

 

“Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.”

–      Pablo Neruda

We get comfortable in our mediocrity when we grow old. We lose that wide-eyed wonder that molded us. We internalize life. We grow older and learn how to be afraid. We replace our wonder and curiosity with a need to imitate and emulate. A child, on the other hand, lives in life. Children are an open nerve, feeling life. The way they perceive the world is powerful and deep.  But they're rarely taught how rewarding it would be to keep that sense of wonder because adults encourage them to leave it behind as they did. Our want for clear, tangible results took precedence over the more critical process required to get better results, and we became content with choosing from the diversity of ideas from those around us. We lost our patience for discovery. We neglected the child within that is patiently waiting for us to empower let it guide us. There is power in that simplicity. We mistake childish perception as naïve or simplistic. On the contrary, there is a deep purity to childish perception. We must begin to identify that perception as qualified creative courage.

Have you ever looked at how a child draws a person? Many drawings I’ve seen were rudimentary, consisting of a circle with two dots for eyes, a big smile for a mouth, and arms and legs coming off the circle.  They look a bit like this:

Many might find this drawing charming or cute, but I’m more curious of our opinion of the process. Consider how we tend to judge artwork and apply that consideration to this drawing. We may believe that this drawing is not a good representation of what a person looks like, and we might conclude that its lack of sophistication is due to the fact that a child drew it. But if you consider that the child's intent was not to impress your notions of what a person should look like, you may begin to see this drawing differently.

Take a moment to consider what a child sees when interacting with people. They look into eyes, which are on the face. They speak from a mouth and hear from ears that are also on the face. Everything they know and see of people is on the face. Arms are there to bring food to the face and legs are there to get the face from place to place. Satisfying the needs of others does not motivate them. They are depicting their perception of what is important in the illustration of a person. The torso does not define a person; what does are the moments of engagement and tools used in those engagements. This is what is missing from our perception, as we grow older. We begin to have a need to impress others with the result of our search to communicate ideas in an accepted format, but that limits us. We edit ourselves out of reaching our creative need to find the wonderful. The richness of things we feel we can’t express in an exceptional way. How many of us have had something wonderful to share and not had the words to express them. Is it a lack of words or a preserved notion that others may not understand our idea? 

Now compare your drawing with this one. Did you express your love for the person you drew freely? Or were you focusing on creating a factual illustration of that person? There is no right or wrong way to illustrate. My goal is to make you see your creative process in action. If you see ways to expand your perception from this illustration and feel you may have stifled yourself, give it another shot. Open yourself up fully in the illustration and express what you feel. Nobody will see the drawing but you. Try your best to deprogram your fears for a moment.

We need to strive to see the world through younger eyes. We need to live with the fearless sense of expression of a child. Stripping away the binding fear of judgment will clear the path to innovative ways of seeing our creative potential.

The Wicked Tusk of the Narwhal

“You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing to you how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.”
 – Pablo Neruda from the poem the Enigmas

In the poem Neruda speaks of the narwhal, that is an odd looking whale with a tusk that protrudes from its mouth. An animal feared and once thought to be a monster. The creature is used to illustrate how we make snap judgment. The answer is relative to the asker. People live within their own values and morals. We are all slaves to our own experiences. A person who lives a peaceful life is affected by cruelty differently than a person who had never known a life without cruelty. It’s natural to see how difficult it is making judgments on choices or what is right and wrong when the fact that all of us are so tightly wound in our experiences and fears that it makes highly improbable that any of us will ever see things the same. Understanding people instead of vilifying them for believing differently is instrumental in the evolution of humanity and the key to the development of our own understanding of our creative capacity.

Nuance

Nuance surprises us. We often don’t seek it out. It just sneaks up on us. It is the unexpected insertion of life into the adequate expression of a thing. We don’t consciously miss it, but definitely know when it happens.

You see this very clearly in music. An amateur cellist for example can take a sheet of music and play every note perfectly. Not one error. Not one missed beat. Yet the same sheet of music in the hands of a seasoned cellist result in something very different. The same notes are also played in the same order and tempo yet there is a life within the melody you don’t get from the amateur. There is fullness to the execution that only comes from complete faith in intuition and skill. This is also true in our creativity. The creative process is a skill to be mastered. We begin to focus less on the acquisition of ideas and innovations and begin to act instinctively and trust our judgment. Trust it so deeply in fact that we are able to just live in the process. In the same way be become familiar with a musical instrument.  Our understanding and implementation of it at its fullest capacity becomes a common practice. We then begin to act instinctively and become less focused on our technique and more focused on the experience of expression. We live it rather than execute it. It becomes equivalent to our expression rather than what we do to express ourselves. It is the moment when you become creatively free.

The Rain

Fall Upward

We take in our days with the familiarity of comfort. We believe in our predictions. We depend on the consistency of our survival while forsaking exposure to a deeper consideration. We tell ourselves that there is little hope in chance even while we take it. But all of us have wandered. All of us have walked into the dark places with wide eyes and have been elevated by the discovery. Those moments are not chance exploration. Those moments define our "why". They are the essence of what makes you believe in your truth. They are manifestations of our creativity and courage. A new belief holds power. A power that like a fire spreads and grows but builds rather than destroys. It inspires and delivers opportunity. We do this and call it luck. We explore and see new things and don't take credit for noticing. Learning and teaching take equal shares of courage. Accepting a new idea at times feels like standing on the edge of a rocky cliff and letting yourself fall forward. But it's important to realize that there is no gravity in the creative process. You are in control. Allow yourself to fall upward. Learning and teaching, listening and sharing is the most important thing we can do for each other.

Nobody Cares about You

Sorry if that seems harsh, but the truth is in the way that statement makes you feel. If you agree, then I am likely right. If you are offended by that statement, you likely don't believe it's true and you've already begun to file through all the reasons why'.

"I have value!"
"I make a difference!"
"I change lives!"

Great! That is the perfect state of mind to be in to get some real work done. If you really believe those things are true, you must ask yourself if others also think that way about you or your brand. Do people seek you out? Do they value associating with you? If not, is it their fault, or yours?

When people ask "What do you do?", are they looking for a list of tasks? Or, are they actually asking "What can you fix?", or "Can you enlighten me on solutions I didn't even realize I need?" If they had the answer to those questions then they wouldn't be talking to you, right? So, it's not about you, it's about the results you can achieve.

But to find out how to answer those questions, you first need to figure out what it is you do, how you do it and why you do it. Be truthful to yourself at this point, as it will lead you on the right path. It will open your eyes to the value and impact of what you do. This makes answering the big questions easier, because you become more qualified to understand what motivates and drives you. Solutions manifest themselves more quickly as a result, and you can answer the "What can you fix?" questions with confidence.

When people ask you, "What do you do?", you should describe the impact of what you do first. Then the tactics on how you get those results, so they can clearly see how what you do impacts what they need.