Creativity and difficulty (#99)

I work in a creative profession, and am always looking for insights into how creativity works, as well as ways to get unstuck creatively to do my best work. There are a number of blogs and writers whose work I regularly follow on the topic; the work and insights of others frequently helps re-frame my perspective. Here are some insights I've gained from them.  Sparring Mind is one.

 If I've learned anything in nearly 12 years of dragging heavy things around cold places it's that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown. -- Ben Saunders, Arctic explorer

Sparring Mind has a great collection of articles on creativity, resilience, and how to make things that matter. Worth a look.

An open letter to the next generation of angry young women

Dear Alexis,

I won’t stop being angry.

I know you through your family; I've enjoyed seeing your exuberant smile and boundless energy as you walk onto the stage of adult womanhood. Welcome. I read your post as I watch my own daughter and son navigating their teen years, and I think about what is ahead for them. All the joy, and all the pain.

I read your exhortation to stay angry, beyond the passing of news about the Stanford rape case and its injustice. And I have to tell you a secret. 

I won’t stop being angry, ever.

Even as I pray, yoga, run, and cultivate compassion, I won’t. You see, I was sexually assaulted too, when I was a young woman. Another time I was assaulted on a running trail, and a man tried to pull me into his car. Like you and so many other women, I had to recount my traumatizing experiences to strangers and have my motives and actions picked apart by people who were supposed to be on my side, protect and advocate for me. I didn’t even get to the part where my attackers stood before a judge. 

My sisters are angry too; both biological and non-biological sisters have been through this, along with the men and women who love them.

My mother was angry too. I don't know about her experiences with men besides my father, because her generation wasn't allowed to speak up at your age. But I know she was angry, and more than that she found her voice by the time I came. She took me to NOW and ERA rallies when I was a girl, to marches, meetings, consciousness-raising sessions, and most importantly she brought me with her while she got petitions signed, while she stuffed bags with political literature and hung them on doorknobs, translating her anger and frustration to real change one doorknob at a time. 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull ran for president in 1872, long before women had the right to vote

She did something about it. And she taught me to do something about it. Now you are teaching, too.
My mother's generation dared to speak out, and mine has picked up the torch and carried on that work. But there is obviously much more to do.

So you see: you are joining a long, long history of angry women. 

I’ve lived with the reality of sexual assault and the fear of assault for decades. It’s part of the background of life, like living in a war zone where you never really feel safe, not ever. You never know when the bomb is going to explode, safety is an illusion, but you have to keep going.

that feeling you get

Unfortunately, I’m not alone in feeling that way. One in five of our sisters lives with that feeling too; wherever I am, I'm hanging out with survivors, with women who have not received justice. I know some of their stories; others can’t even tell theirs.

You have my love and respect for speaking out, for taking your case to the university. For every women who couldn’t come forward, you spoke for her, speak for her. It makes a difference.

There are so many of us, so many men and women who truly care about this issue because they and their partners and children have been through this pain. We move through the horror and don’t let it destroy the joy, the love, all the good things and good relationships in our lives. 

Keep going. You aren’t carrying this alone. 

There are more of us than you think. Way more. Every time you are in the grocery store, count five people. One of them (maybe more) is angry, maybe has been for decades. We won’t stop. We can’t. Our daughters and sons are counting on us. You are amazing and fierce. But most important, you are not alone. Don't ever think that. Knowing that you are not alone is *how* you stay angry without letting it destroy you. The way we treat women has to change. It is changing. 

Thank you, and thanks to your sisters and brothers who are out there adding your beautiful, unique voice.
 

How to save your own life

Published in Elephant Journal

“The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

- Erica Jong

A friend once told me:

half the people in our running group were going through divorce, confronting change and loss. Another third were working through broken bodies and sickness, Confronting mortality.

The rest were just regular crazy. I think I'm a bit of each.

In running, I become a student of me and my limits. In running, I become a student of the universe and its limitlessness. In running, I learn the distinction between the two is everything and nothing.

Running doesn't give joy. It allows the space to give joy to yourself.

Running won't save you. It allows the space to save yourself.

So, to save your own life: Go for a long run.

Run beyond the thunderstorm. Run beyond your tears. Outlast your phone battery. Outlast fear of being alone in the woods.

Run along the river, run in the woods. Run with crickets and egrets and dark green. Run until you are so tired you can at last be still, and listen to what the river has to tell you about living a life.

Rush and bubble and gush, joy in full force, become a tributary and flow into the river. Flow around the obstacles. Let the wind move you, the sun warm you, make you glitter and shine.

Converge with other tributaries, flow and surge. When spread too thin in the shallows, slow down.

Pool and puddle and pause, become a source for deep-rooted trees and lush stories, and for people and places that don't know they need you. Then reflect back that beauty for others to enjoy.

Run along, and when you are tired from running then flow. Unseen forces are moving you, even when you seem to be still.

Bear witness to joy, to stillness, bear witness to yourself. Go for a long run, and save your own life.

What is The Thing For Which You Struggle?

Honoring the Struggle that Requires Everything

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance for those who died in the fight for our good and lasting freedoms. It’s for those who literally gave it their all, whose struggle required everything of them. Some of these knew they were going to die, and did it anyway. Some endured great pain, and did it anyway.

For the fearful, the pained, those knowingly going to die, the struggle was about more than themselves.

Remembering those who struggled and lost everything is important not just because freedom isn’t free. Remembering them and their struggle is essential because we all struggle and fight in life, some of us more than others, and the knowledge that this struggle might require everything of us is part of making it real and present for each of us.

But it’s also essential because the lesson of these victorious dead is to make that struggle count for something greater than simply removing pain or discomfort. Those who gave everything to make their time on this planet count for something greater can teach us valuable lessons about the best life, about struggling for something worth the struggle. That includes the struggle against war and violence.

That said, in my view Memorial Day isn’t about glorifying war or armed conflict. I believe that is too narrow a view.

Memorial Day is about courage in the face of violence and death (which requires being present), and about thinking beyond ourselves, to make our inevitable life struggles count for much more than ourselves and our immediate families. That struggle even unto death might be the struggle of a soldier. It is also the struggle and courage of the peaceful protester, the civil disobedient, the evangelist who continues to speak his truth. It is the struggle of the field nurse who brings broken soldiers back to health, time and again despite its apparent futility, to give back hope.

To me, Memorial Day is a day to decorate the graves of these people too. Because if all we valorize and decorate are the graves of those who died fighting in armed conflicts, I believe we are selling our humanity short. Courage is courage, both on and off the battlefield.

Human rights activist Stephane Hessel, who was a concentration camp survivor and a redactor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wrote in his tract Indignez Vous!

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate… To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, TO CREATE IS TO RESIST. TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Looking beyond war, behind the war machine to truly honor those who gave their lives courageously for the great gift of freedom we enjoy requires, in my view, understanding their struggle and courage in this context. And it demands that we also view Memorial Day as a day to honor those for whom the struggle and sacrifice was in the service of nonviolent protest, in the service of love and peace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

I believe that the more we honor and seek to emulate these struggles-in-the-face-of-death for something greater, the better our communities, cities, and country will be, and the better we ourselves will become.

The coupling of coincidence and choice

There is no calculus.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day…Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The pattern of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. They come together in these moments that are the coupling of unseen forces, a generative warmth, a secret romance between the unknowns that are also our parents. — Rebecca Solnit

When I started my marathon journey blog, I wrote early on about an observation by Eric Meyer, whose young daughter had passed away. He remarked that after such catastrophes sometimes couples split up, but there is no formula or calculus to know which couples will make it and which won’t. “It isn’t strength that keeps a couple together in the face of crisis. It’s having the luck to remain compatible under the most extreme pressures,” he said. “Like any complex interaction between two complex systems, the outcome is fundamentally unpredictable.” It has to do with the series of moments of coincidence that make up the couple’s history and experience.

Not all the accidents in our lives that provide the things that fall together to make us are secret romances and warmth. Some of the accidents are catastrophes, misfortunes, and several are moments of decision, a moment to change everything and end a marriage, quit one’s job, or move across country. Those moments of decision are patterns and have a regularity, but they are also the results of all the things that barely happened to put us there, at that moment of decision. As Meyer and Solnit note, even these dramatic accidents are not alone sufficient to move a life in one way or another. There is always agency, always a series of moments of decision that give movement to those inexplicable coincidences.

During the process of my separation and divorce a supportive friend once told me her marriage was in shambles and she had been thinking of leaving for a long time, but either she didn’t have the courage or hadn’t yet arrived at the moment of decision to leave. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t arrived there yet, because she was truly miserable. But the inexplicabilities of her life’s coincidences had taken her to a place that was not her moment of decision. For couples who do split up, the series of accidents and whether and when they lead to a split or not are ultimately unpredictable; frequently friends remark with surprise because the couple in question was one they thought would always hold together.

There is often nothing grand or dramatic or even particularly clear about the arrival of that moment in a marriage; it most often doesn’t arrive with fanfare or drama. Sometimes it arrives because of the accidents of catastrophes and misfortunes and other dramatic moments, but whether or not such catastrophes lead to a moment of decision and what direction that decision takes are fundamentally unpredictable. Rather, they contribute to the coupling of unseen forces of things that did not drift apart, but moved together for a while until that moment of decision was taken up.

Like other incredible events, the exquisite candid and fashion photographs of Frank Horvat often came about because of a coupling of unseen forces, patterns of moments that suddenly coalesced and made manifest a particular moment in time. Horvat’s trick was to carry a camera at all times, so he could increase his chances of capturing such inexplicable coincidences. Building a writing practice or a new career or a new love are all a coupling of coincidence and choice, combined with a decision to carry that camera.

We Americans in particular have a love-hate relationship with the deus ex machina of the story. Like the ancient Greek critics, we prefer for events to unfold neatly based on the statistical evidence available and the finite list of players on the stage, but we also love the flair of the dramatic outlier, the hero of the story taking the momentus choice that pulls everything together because of his grand act of courage, pulling the baby from the burning building at the last moment. We love to point to the singular moment, the momentus decision. The combination of predictability and momentus choice lets us swing between predictability and heroism; I think we crave both the tragic and heroic story. Unfortunately, I think building a writing practice, career, or love is neither. Ultimately, building love or a writing practice or a new career are more like a series of inexplicabilities combined with a series of small moments of decision. That means heroic acts of determination increase the odds of success, and events provide the necessary but not sufficient coincidence, but the outcome is fundamentally out of our control. What remains for us is whether or not we carry the camera.

Living generously

Dr. Kelly Flanagan wrote a beautiful piece recently about what the experience of acceptance, grace, generosity does for us:

This is the brilliance of grace: it welcomes our darkness into the light and does nothing to it, knowing that it doesn’t have to, because darkness thrives on hiddenness, and it’s at the mercy of the light. Light drives out darkness, not the other way around.

When we no longer have to push our darkness back down beneath layers of shame our darkness doesn’t stand a chance.

What about the other side of that equation? What does it mean to be the person providing that acceptance and generosity?

Individually, we have to nurture generosity in ourselves.

I believe the drive to live generously lives in most people. We want to be the gracious host, the good friend, the pocket of grace in a condemning world.

It takes work; even people we love, know, and trust can be brutal, crabby, just plain difficult, never mind extending generosity to the stranger, the person outside our tribe, the one from somewhere else who has nothing to offer us and no relations with us to oblige our indulgence.

Taking care of ourselves, rest, exercise, connecting with people who treat us well and care for us, and taking time daily to be with and experience what moves and inspires us creates a space in ourselves that allows us to live with generosity.

Collectively, we can create pockets of grace too.

There are so many examples of communities and organizations countering the trend towards criminalizing homelessness. It's important to recognize them too. I was struck recently by a story about RainCity Housing, a Vancouver nonprofit, worked with an ad agency to create benches that double as emergency shelter for "rough sleepers", with advertising that provides information on the shelter.

Another law attempting to criminalize homelessness, this one a Los Angeles ban on people sleeping in cars, has been struck down by a federal appeals court on the grounds it would open the door to discriminatory treatment against the poor.

Dr. Flanagan said

I can tell you now, grace isn’t just acceptance of the status quo. Grace contains the status quo—all of our struggle and pain and mess—and embraces us and values us anyway. Grace demands that nothing be changed for love and connection to happen, and that kind of love has power.

The power to accept people where they are, especially when it's outside our cultural comfort zone, is a power we can wield to help them begin again. Amazing stuff.

The importance of test runs. Plus, the shirt.

10 mile marathon course "test run" yesterday. Which went really well! Except for one thing, which reminded me why test runs are important.

Ah, the new shoes. Love them! Purple, sparkly, and unfortunately left a blood blister on my right foot. Which is why new shoes should be broken in gradually (I knew that), and why test runs are important.

This applies to everything we do, whether you're doing a job interview, managing a big project, swatching with your knitting before doing that big project, or running a long race. Give yourself some test runs! Here are some other reasons:

• They build confidence. Every performer knows that the only way to get a handle on nervousness (or sheer terror) associated with doing something new, important, or in front of a whole lotta people is to do it. This applies to everything we do: the more you practice (especially if you can do it in a lower-stakes setting, like a practice run), the more confident you will feel on the big day.
• They orient you. Getting a lay of the land before-hand, how the course will run, gives you one less distraction.
• Gives you time to fail. And fail. And begin again. Shorter runs, practice sessions, smaller-stakes projects are lower-cost opportunities to fail, be stupid (whether from poor planning or, um, new shoes). “If you can remove all fears and go one step at a time, you will find things that will guide you along the way,” said Tobias van Schneider, product designer for Spotify. “You will learn new things, absorb new information, meet people, get feedback, see demand in different areas — new doors will open up for you.”

Test runs are a gift you give yourself.

Run with me!

Also, officially unveiling the race shirt! You know, the one I'll put your name (or your company's logo) on if you donate to Lazarus House on my fundraising page:

I'll be adding the name of my blog and the LH logo to my shirt shortly, but there's plenty of room for your name! What are you waiting for?

Shout-out  to my first two donors, Blaine Richards and Kristi Loar! Thank you for your generous support of Lazarus House, and for running with me in September!

Impossible Conditions

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. - Doris Lessing

The hot, humid is here. That means running gets hard (just like February when it was 10F). So I have to start over, slow down, dress different, pay attention to water.

I ran through this winter's impossible conditions because my friends were, every Saturday, and I wanted to run with them more.

Conditions are going to be impossible. Find something you want more, and start anyway.

Change is slow

In marathon training, runners are told to add no more than 10% to their distance per week, a technique called progressive overload. More than that, and you risk injury.

It's easy to get impatient. The slow, incremental changes that come with both the habit of daily mileage and the gradual increase in miles can seem to take forever.

Change is slow. Focus on the step in front of you.

And you will learn about yourself. You will have slow change. You will help yourself and others through this change. You will find out what it’s really like when you put in the effort. You will find happiness in each step, in the learning you experience along the way.

Change is worth the effort, and the results aren’t what you fantasize about — they’re much better, if you pay attention.

http://zenhabits.net/slowchange/