Creativity, Compassion, Conflict
Here’s a way to blog: you take a few things that are currently of interest to you, and then you start to ramble and see if they make sense together. Sometimes they really do! Sometimes it’s kind of a stretch….
The first thing I’ve been thinking about is compassion and weariness and how it’s really hard to keep flexing our compassion muscles when we’re bone tired. I mean, I am. The insomnia is back. I keep thinking of my man Bruce, and his:
I get up in the evenin'
And I ain't got nothin' to say
I come home in the mornin'
I go to bed feelin' the same way
I ain't nothin' but tired
Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help
You can't start a fire
You can't start a fire without a spark
When I have compassion fatigue, interestingly (at least to me), this is also when my creativity sags, too. Maybe a lot of us are weary of each other, though. That’s fair, right? It’s been a long haul through some trying times. I understand why people are tired of me.
Rumi:
“I don’t get tired of you. Don’t grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!”
Well, you know, flip that page over and you get:
“But that shadow has been serving you!
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
I can explain this, but it would break
the glass cover on your heart,
and there’s no fixing that.
You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.”
“The soul,” says Rumi, “lives there in the silent breath.”
So, then the idea of Awe, brings me to the latest episode of my favourite podcast, On Being with Krista Tippett. Probably if you’re reading my blog, you’re also a listener of On Being. It’s been a longtime inspiration for me, and a grounding experience, and likely for you, too. Did you listen to the one on awe? Beautiful. And then, the one on Good Conflict with Amanda Ripley. And the whole thing contains so much good thinking that I know I’ll be referring to it again and again. But the ending where she talks about the bus driver just got me, partly because I do something similar to this quite often in my day job. Ripley talks about meeting Dan a bus driver via Twitter, and how he’s a bit of a vulnerable and captive audience on his bus. So he starts off with everyone getting on the bus with a greeting and a real smile. Pretty easy, right? But we often leave that step out. So, okay, here’s more, when conflict erupts:
Ripley: And then when conflict erupted, he has a methodology, which I love, which is basically: two questions and a choice. So first, he pulls the bus over and opens all the doors because it’s important not to corner people who are in conflict, metaphorically or literally. Let me just say that again. It is important not to corner people who are in conflict. Something to keep in mind. They have to have a way out. And so then he gets on the intercom, which is helpful. I wish I had an intercom. [audience laughs]
Tippett:[laughs] Yeah.
Ripley: And he says, “What happened?” He doesn’t say, I mean, there’s a million things he could say. Like, “What are you doing? What is your problem?” And he says, “What happened?” In a voice of genuinely wanting to know. So this takes practice.
Tippett: Yeah.
Ripley:And then, you know what usually happens? Because people, when they’re in that amygdala hijack mode, they don’t really see a question coming. So it forces them to think for a second.
Ripley: And so they’ll say, “well he closed the window and I da da.” And Dan will say, “I can tell you’re really mad.” So he’s looping them quickly. And then he says, “What do you want to do next?” So it’s not him telling them. And then he gives them a choice, which — because usually that flummoxes them, like, “wah wah wah.” And then he says — that’s my angry conflict voice — and then he says, “I could call someone right now, which I’m going to have to do, or you could come up here and talk with me. And we get everyone safely to where they’re going.” So he’s offering them a way out: come with me. There’s a lot more to it but he’s just a very wise, experienced practitioner. [laughs]
So, to summarize: two questions and a choice. What happened? What do you want to do next? Followed by, you could do this or you could do that…
The previous part of the discussion on high conflict and the usefulness and hopefulness of approaching conflict with a complexity of thought was actually pretty uplifting to read. Which, sounds pretty obvious, right? But it’s been tricky in this time, for sure, to be able to create a space where we can talk at all, let alone draw out the complexities of each side.
So then, creativity. I’ve been thinking about how of course we’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s perfectly okay. I’ve been doing this long enough to know (because surprisingly people tell you in all sorts of ways haha) that a lot of folks don’t like my writing, they don’t like my photos, or even this blog. And they don’t even always spell my name right when they let me know. You have to be at peace with that. You have to not let it affect your creative practice. And I one hundred percent am at peace. It’s the price you pay for being in this very lucky position to be making art and living a creative life, even if only half time in my case.
I’ve written about Magda Szabo and her novels before. And even though I’m still not reading at the pace I once did, I picked up her book, The Door, and re-read it in two sittings. The book is about illness, shame, broken trust, and as Ali Smith says in the intro, it’s also “a commentary on the writing process, the snobberies of art, the uses and barters of creativity, and the ways in which stories and life conspire against the artist’s attempts to control them.”
There’s a part in the novel where the narrator, a writer, has been in conflict with Emerence, the housekeeper who is much more than that, who seems to have left the employ of the narrator and her husband. She says, “I felt tired, so tired it no longer felt real; though I had no right or reason to feel so utterly weary. Nothing had occurred that should have caused such exhaustion. I found lunch in the fridge, just as before.”
And then:
“I hadn’t been able to write a single line, but then the ebb and flow of writing involves, even on good days, being in a state of grace. The situation had drained my energy. Cheerfulness keeps you fresh, its opposite exhausts.”
Later our writer narrator visits and then doesn’t visit Emerence in hospital. She says, “I would have loved to write, but as I’ve said, creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed — stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement — and these elements were missing.”
It’s been difficult to achieve composure. It’s been difficult to achieve anything close to a state of grace. It’s instructive to note that the narrator’s name in Magda Szabo’s novel is Magda.
What is the expression? The only way out is through? One must rearrange the metaphorical furniture of one’s creative house constantly while also conserving one’s best good energy. The average person who sees your creative output will have no idea what a gargantuan task this is.
I’ll leave you with this by Enrique Martinez Celaya:
“When you get stuck, when you cannot find the way in the studio, go to the studio anyway. Read there. Mop the floor. Rearrange things. Something will eventually happen.”
