What I Learned in Pre-School

The article was titled, “The Idea of Creativity, the Creativity Behind an Idea.” Of course it intrigued me.

The importance of creativity and creative thinking has risen to the top of the MBA curriculum and now finds itself in all discussions about business, success, and the need to stave off the decline of America.

Evidently you can be a creativity expert, and Frank Härén is positioned as that by putting on seminars, writing a book, and founding the Interesting Organization.  He and his work were the focus of the article. It’s worth a read and can be found here.

The article has various aspects, but in it he talks about creativity and also about the idea. He even has a formula for the idea –- idea=p(k+i). P is people, K is knowledge, and I is information. I didn’t find this too creative.

But I did find something interesting under the subheading “Where did our creativity go?”

Creativity does not come overnight. Showing how difficult it was for an individual to think beyond the common, Härén asked his audience to use their imaginations to come up with a list of ten impossible things that they wish to have. When he compared the answers to his own list of ten things, most of the responses were, as he predicted, similar – the 'the ability to be invisible', 'the ability to fly', etc – perhaps like "model answers" to the question. “There are one billion things we could have used our imagination to say and we don’t even have ten unique answers!”

Pre-schoolers, on the other hand, answered differently. They wanted to be able to touch love, to lift a bus without breaking a finger, to see with their fingers, etc. This, to Härén, is proof that we are born to think creatively, but we lose our creativity along the way as we conform to norms, expectations and institutions. “We’re animals of habits, gaps and comfort zones. When we do things differently, someone comes and tells us that we’re doing it wrong and we stop doing it,” he said.

I’ve had this discussion with many people over the years and believe that we do or can lose some confidence in our creative abilities as we grow. I found this paragraph to aptly fit something I experienced recently.

I was surfing around the Writer’s Digest website and found myself on a page that suggested writing prompts. A quick scan didn’t yield anything until the following caught my eye:

You wake up one day with an unusual super power that seems pretty worthless – until you are caught in a situation that requires that specific ‘talent.’

I was at attention, but let’s just say that I wasn’t thinking like a pre-schooler. I tried. Honest. Here’s how my thought process began…

Hmmm. Strength is usually one of those super skills. The ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. To become invisible. To see through concrete or steel or whatever. To grow into a giant when irritated. To turn green.

None of that is really appealing, and some of that is actually quite useful. So a worthless power, well that takes some tossing around.

How about holding your nose and turning your body into a powerful magnet? Rather useless unless you’re in a room full of thugs with guns.

Where did that come from?

Making a sound like… a whistle to attract an animal or to scare an animal…ears that glow…the ability to click your tongue – I read all of the Ladies Detective Agency books and it stuck with me…

I abandoned the exercise after staring out of the window for a good while, coming up blank. Had I been one of those pre-schoolers, I would have come up with all kinds of creative ideas. Like the ability to taste something and know its origin – worthless unless you’re trying to determine if you’ve been sold the wrong grapes, like Gallo. Or the ability to look at a handwritten note and see the face of the person wrote it – worthless unless you’re reading a ransom note from the person(s) who stole the Friesian cow. Or how about if you could think of an event that happened in the past and close your eyes to see the quantum bumps that it created, sort of like a film, perhaps like Sliding Doors. Worthless but useful in so many ways.

We have read that everything we know we learned in kindergarten, and while it’s put forth that life and environment affect our confidence in our abilities, I’d say the best super power to have is the one that lets us see that we’ve been given infinite gifts and abilities and that we possess and use them every day.

Worthless?

April 1st: The Update

While I've been slow on the blog, it's hard to believe that I haven't yet included any of the April 1st Project for the year. So here's a catch up.

Quotes discovered:

The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.
  - Fernand Braudel

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
  - George Bernard Shaw

Self trust is the first secret of success.
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man is the only being who knows he's alone.
  - Octavio Paz

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.
  - Andrew Jackson

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
  - Lillian Hellman

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
  - Albert Einstein

The basic formula for all sin is: frustrated or neglected love.
  - Franz Werfel, Between Heaven and Earth

We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny...An inescapable network of mutuality...I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.
  - Martin Luther King Jr.

So if you think your life is complete confusion because your neighbor's got it made, just remember that it's a grand illusion and deep inside we're all the same.
  - Styx, The Grand Illusion

A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
  - Chinese Proverb

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
  - Aristotle

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
  - Frank Lloyd Wright

Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
  - Arthur Brisbane

And now for some photos:

Kuala Lumpur

When I was young, I lived for a time in Kuala Lumpur. Our house was in a rather new neighborhood that wasn’t fully developed. Several empty lots separated our house from our neighbors on one side. On the other, a local couple lived quietly until the early evening hours when a disagreement between partners would ensue, and the wife would chase the husband around with a butcher knife.

It was an exciting place. Exotic for obvious reasons, tropical and moist.

Behind our home was an unknown area, the perfect curiosity for children. My memory fails the particulars, but I do recall a wet and rainy day – not unusual – in which we explored what lied amongst the vegetation. We discovered a giant spider – big to all of us, scary as well. My brother stepped in quick sand, and we feared his drowning into a pool of light brown gunk.

On rainy days, the children of the neighborhood would meet in those empty lots, pick sides, and begin a mud ball fight. As in any ‘battle,’ we had strategies, defectors, and pain. The sneaky ones, myself included, would sometimes put rocks inside of the mud balls and throw them as hard as we could. The rain came down, the mud caked our clothes and hair, and we only stopped the fighting when the voices of our amahs coaxed us out of the downpour.

We sat with our parents on the front porch, our dogs slinking about to find a cool spot to rest. We watched the color of the sky change, and we felt the air get still.

I loved Malaysia.

We sucked sugar cane cut from the backyard. Laughed when my mother stepped on a thorn and thought it was the black king cobra lurking in our yard. And I cried and screamed when the monkey, a pet of neighbors down the block, would pull my hair.

I long to go back and see the place where I lived. To find the street where I went over the handlebars and ‘came this close to hitting a parked Mercedes,’ according to my father. To visit the local market. To see if the school I attended still stands.

My puzzle of childhood memory has lost many pieces. It is the ones I hold, trying to determine where their shape fits, that surface unexpectedly and I turn them in my hand.

When I sit here to write and think about what to share, I go back to the past to see if something of it can be told about the present. There is no concrete connection to today, but I know that those experiences are part of the present moment.

I’m drawn back in time when I’m looking for possibilities and trying to forge into new and unknown territory. I guess I’m trying to conjure that wide-eyed girl who went forth into the thicket and came out with new stories to tell.