Creativity Breeds Creativity



Sometimes creativity is like a
hidden staircase.



Last week, I finished a theater piece for woodwind quintet.  At times during the process of composing it, I struggled with the idea that being creative means not being responsible or dependable.  I have this idea in my head that one can potentially lose oneself in creative pursuits -- that giving in too much to creativity can lead one far from "normal" society.  I know this is a ridiculous thing for a composer to believe, but since I was raised with the idea that it's very important to be a responsible, mature person, it's a challenge when creativity seems to threaten that.

I'm probably a bit more conscientious than necessary most of the time.  Truth be told, I'm not at risk for being labeled unreliable by anyone who knows me.  When I was in the midst of this woodwind quintet piece and I felt that I was limiting myself, caging in what I allowed myself to create, I made a different decision than what I have sometimes made.  I leapt over the precipice of creativity without worrying about any beliefs that might tether me in some imaginary place of safety.

Something happened.  Not only am I very satisfied with the piece I just completed, but in the past few days, I composed a set of improvisatory miniatures.  I just followed a little germ of inspiration and allowed my creativity to be important.  I've also started formulating a plan to find or assemble an ensemble in Fort Worth, I'm continuing to move forward with a libretto for a first opera, and I've begun to assemble some writing for self-publication.  I also started a new blog a couple of weeks back to articulate some thoughts about spirituality.  And all of these projects are stimulating and exciting.

Fully claiming the identity of creator disallows feeble excuses and supercharges intention.  Instead of complaining that a certain situation doesn't exist or may be difficult to find, I'm realizing (again) that I'm responsible for creating the situations I want in my life.  And being creative with one thing has sparked my creativity across the board.  I haven't heard any reports that I've become unreliable or irresponsible.  What I am in this space is more reliable and responsible to myself.  I know that there will be challenges at some point, but it's always easier to return to something once I know what it feels like.

My Own Worst Enemy

As I've mentioned before, learning is like a spiral.  I keep encountering the same issues over and over again, but I usually get to approach them from a slightly new perspective.  This week, it was the idea of asking for what I want (which seems to have been on my mind about a year ago as well).  The challenge hasn't been in knowing what I want or how to articulate it.  Rather, I have this sense that people who are bold about stating what they want are jerks, to put it mildly.

Actually, that's not entirely true.  I respect people who state what they want clearly, and I appreciate knowing what matters to someone.  The option is to play guessing games, and that often winds up just being an exercise in frustration.  So really, my belief about stating what I want is that people are going to think that I am a jerk.  So, it's more about vulnerability and opening myself up to other people's judgment.  And if I'm honest about it, this means I often fear that other people will be a threat to getting what I want rather than a boon.  When I think about it intellectually, this is a silly fear, but it's still a fear.

So, even though I appreciate it when people are clear about what they want, the prospect of clearly expressing what I want has been intimidating.  The way I often perceive it, stating what I want puts me at other people's mercy.  Other people can determine whether I deserve what I want or not, and they get to decide whether they are going to help or hinder.  Of course, the irrational fear is that people are more likely to choose to hinder me than help me.  So, when I state what I want, I have to be strong about it.  Defiant even.  No wonder I'm afraid of coming across like a jerk.

But I don't want to come across as being a jerk, so I just keep my mouth shut about what I actually want and complain under my breath about not getting it.  When I really think about it, there are other options.  Stating what I want doesn't place any responsibility on someone else to make sure I get it.  Creating what I want is still up to me, and being clear about it can make all sorts of decisions easier.  Other people can play a part in that creation, but the responsibility for making what I want important is mine and mine alone.  While a few people have chosen to put obstacles in my path from time to time, others have been invaluable.  And although I don't know this, I suspect that the people who chose to make a situation more difficult than it could have been probably would have done so whether or not they knew what I wanted.

The best way for me to get what I want is to ask for it and trust in my ability to create it.  In personal relationships, this looks like what some people would call defining the relationship, being willing to say what I want clearly and being willing to listen to what the other person wants.  With the music I compose, it means creating without second guessing my vision for a piece, and diligently building relationships with performers so that the music can be heard.  Being honest with myself about what I really want in any given situation might mean setting the bar fairly high.  Personally, I would rather reap the benefits of dedication to a high standard than spend time complaining about not getting what I want.

Being Wrong

At one point, I worked with an organization whose members endeavored not to make other people wrong. It was an actual agreement among the leadership of the organization, but it was also a practice encouraged among its members. Not making other people wrong may seem like an awkward turn of phrase, but it essentially means accepting the validity of someone else's feelings and perspectives without insisting on being right. When we get into a right and wrong mindset, it is usually ourselves we would prefer to be right and the other person we'd prefer be wrong, so agreeing not to make another person wrong is a way of saying, "I don't need to be right. I'm open to other perspectives and ideas."

The intent, of course, was to encourage creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, as well as receptivity and open-mindedness.  If I won't be criticized for what I say because no one going to make me wrong, then I'll be a lot more likely to contribute my ideas. The problem is that sometimes people are wrong.  Sometimes, people have faulty or incomplete information, and sometimes people draw erroneous conclusions from the information they have.  There are people and groups that continue banging their heads against proverbial walls because no one tells them that they're not looking at useful or accurate data. 

Now, you may conclude that there is a way to indicate that data is inaccurate or incomplete without insisting that an individual is "wrong".  That may have been the whole point of the agreement not to make other people wrong.  But when a person is on the receiving end of that communication, it can be pretty easy for our minds to translate even well-thought-out criticism as, "I'm wrong".  On top of that, one can spend so much effort verbally distinguishing a belief from the believer that any real meaning is lost. 

Of course, belief is the whole issue.  Once I look at a set of numbers and draw a conclusion, that conclusion quickly becomes a belief of mine, whether it's accurate or not.  Challenging someone's beliefs is a big deal.  It's understandable why a person would feel attacked when personal beliefs are on the line.  As you might imagine, many discussions degenerated into whether or not someone had made someone else wrong and never really got back to meaningful topics.  Sometimes everyone just drew different conclusions, and there was no way to reconcile them all into one perspective.  Even when you know that someone's information is inaccurate, if you don't want to be accused of making them wrong, you have to come up with just the right way to convince them to reexamine what they believe without having the tables turned back on your own beliefs. 

The result of that seemingly noble agreement was that everyone's ideas and perspectives were not equally considered, and everyone's conclusions were not equally scrutinized.  Nor should they have been necessarily, except that the claimed framework for interaction suggested otherwise. Just having a policy of honesty and maintaining an open forum where being wrong was OK would have been much easier and, I think, more effective.

I am sometimes wrong.  Everyone I know is sometimes wrong.  We get information and draw conclusions.  When we get more information, we confirm or adjust those conclusions.  We're doing this constantly.  There's no way that anyone can go through life without believing something that's a little bit off at some point.  The challenge for me is not to avoid making other people wrong; it's to be willing to accept when I am wrong about something.  It's not the end of the world.  If it's a big deal not to make someone else wrong, that becomes a threatening situation.  If someone suggests that I'm wrong, I have to defend myself because they're out of line?  Not really.  If we never figure out where we are wrong in our conclusions, we can never improve anything, unless it's sheer luck.  

There isn't necessarily a right and wrong in every situation, and some people will point out a perceived mistake when they don't have accurate information themselves.  Sometimes, there is absolutely a gentle way to let someone else know that they've jumped to a conclusion that doesn't quite make sense, and I'm all in favor of providing more useful data to someone if they're willing to hear.  I think words spoken in love will always be easier to hear.  But the biggest thing is not being afraid to be wrong.  It will happen.  Best to have trustworthy people around you who will send up the red flags rather than perform semantic acrobatics.  

Judgment Is Belief Used as a Weapon

Driving down the freeway, I saw an old van spewing exhaust fumes in a cloud behind it.  My immediate thought was, What a jerk!  (Actually, it was something a bit harsher than "jerk," but that will do.)  Then, I responded back to myself, Why is the driver a jerk exactly?  I drive a hybrid that leaves a much lighter carbon footprint than many vehicles, and although I am pleased by the sense of environmental responsibility, my primary motivation is that I get incredible gas mileage and spend less money on fuel.  I use canvas bags when I go grocery shopping, essentially because it is a very easy habit that I perceive as having a significant effect on the amount of non-biodegradable waste I create without inconveniencing me in the least.  We recycle, which doesn't cost us any more than having our garbage collected and is as easy as throwing something in a different receptacle.  Very low impact on our habits, for a perceived higher impact on the environment, whether or not it actually makes a significant difference in the grand scheme of things.

A depiction of beliefs turned into judgments?

So, when I see this van fogging up the road with exhaust, I label the driver a jerk because he seems unwilling to do his part.  I'm doing my part, so he should at the very least be courteous and conscientious enough not to smog up the road in his wake.  This unknown person became, in my mind, ungrateful, irresponsible, insensitive, unintelligent, and oblivious.  But wait.  What if the driver really is oblivious?  How much of a jerk can a truly oblivious person be?  And while I don't necessarily enjoy the smell, how much confidence do I really have about the actual impact of this vehicle's exhaust?  Aside from my indignation, I don't have a wealth of empirical facts to go on.

On that same trip, I was flipping through radio stations, and I happened to land for a moment on an individual making an outlandish claim based more on a personal victimization theory than on factual evidence.  At the time I didn't associate my own judgment against the van driver with the radio personality's tirade.  Rather, I thought, Why don't people use their brains?  And the dialogue in my own head continued, Maybe they do.

Everyone doesn't see the same things I do, and when they do, they don't always draw the same conclusions I do.  It doesn't have anything to do with right or wrong.  We all come from different circumstances and experiences with different sets of information and beliefs, and so we can't all look through identical lenses.  Although I can't be certain (since I'm not in other people's heads), it's as likely as not that other people do indeed use their brains to their fullest capacity, draw the best conclusions that they can, and choose the courses of action they deem best.  Or some people may simply be oblivious.  How would they even know if they are?  How harshly do I really want to judge someone who literally doesn't know any better?

At the end of the day, I am responsible for my decisions, and I want those decisions to make sense with my knowledge and beliefs.  I can't know what's going on in other people's minds, so it ultimately doesn't make sense for me to assume malice where there may be ignorance or even a thoughtful approach that simply differs from mine.  My conflict with thinking that each person is only responsible for his own life is that I believe that we are interconnected, that we have an impact on and are impacted by other people.  I don't believe that anyone exists in a vacuum.  Our actions (and inaction) have an effect in the world.  That belief provides a framework for my own choices, and it's easy to form an expectation of how that belief can play out with other people who have the same sense of connection.  But how does that work in a messy world of people who are unaware or who have deep conviction about an entirely different interpretation?

The best conclusion I can draw is that my sense of connection with other people does not rely upon their sense of connection to me or anything else.  To judge other people based on my impression of how they should act assumes that everyone should see what I see, know what I know, and draw the same conclusions I draw.  I don't actually think anyone can know how things ought to be, so I don't really want to put myself in that place of perceived omniscience.  All I can do is live out my beliefs to the best of my ability, and accept that there is a world of people who see things from different perspectives.  None of us are completely right, but none of us are completely wrong either.

The Price of Cognitive Dissonance

I am reading Robert Burton's On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, and like many authors who write on similar topics, he discusses cognitive dissonance: the unsettling phenomenon of adhering to two conflicting beliefs at the same time.  In a strange bit of synchronicity, I received some practical advice from another composer this week about pricing music composed for advertising.  He has done quite a bit more negotiating than I in this arena, and he has worked out a system which makes a great deal of sense.  There was one bit that he said that completely floored me, however: "Basically, just figure out the rock-bottom dollar amount you need from the project and start the negotiations at ten times that."

Cognitive dissonance sets in for me because I am confident that he knows what he's talking about, and yet I have concerns about pricing myself out of a project.  The underlying belief is that my time or my abilities aren't worth that much to other people.  It isn't that I think my time or talent isn't valuable -- although I'll freely admit that my mind can slip back to that paraphrasing rather easily.  When I dig down into it, it's the belief that other people don't see the value of what I have to offer, and therefore I can't possibly start off negotiations by asking for ten times what I absolutely need to make.  Three times that figure, maybe.  Any more than that just flies in the face of what I think about other people's ability or willingness to value... well, me.

I know that negotiations for a commercial project are different from collaboration with a music non-profit or a specific chamber ensemble, but in the more "artistic" arenas, I am even more likely to sell myself short because of my beliefs about non-profits and musicians and money.  The key part of my fellow composer's advice, though, is to start negotiations at ten times what I absolutely must make to undertake the project.  That also implies a willingness to come down as far as what I determine to be rock-bottom.  If I start at rock-bottom, I have no room to negotiate, and I won't be giving anyone a chance to see greater value in what I have to offer.

If I never challenge my beliefs about what value other people are capable or willing to see, they are not likely to change. But having a concrete dollar figure as a starting point for negotiation gives me a framework to experiment with my beliefs, which is in my opinion, a healthy way to confront cognitive dissonance.  If I believe two conflicting ideas, I could just choose one arbitrarily.  I could just live with the mental discomfort.  I could develop other beliefs to make sense out of the dissonance.  Confronting the competing beliefs head-on has the potential to lead to a stronger conviction in one direction or the other, and the best way I know to confront the beliefs is to test them where it's possible to do so.  Spiritual beliefs are somewhat immune to testing, but beliefs about negotiating a price for a project (and many other beliefs about myself and other people) are quite easily tested.

So, basing my numbers on a formula that has been tried and tested by a reliable source, I can determine the absolute minimum amount of money I need to receive in order to make a project worthwhile, and I can resolve not to allow negotiations to dip below that absolute minimum amount.  Multiplying that figure by ten gives me the starting point for my end of the negotiations, combined with the time-frame I believe I'll need to complete the work.  From there, the experiment will play out, hopefully over a series of projects, and I'll have a set of clear empirical data against which I can measure my beliefs about what my work is worth.  I can formulate hypotheses ahead of time, but the strong beliefs I have are hypotheses in and of themselves.  Ten times what I absolutely must make still seems exorbitant, and yet a part of me knows that it's an appropriate place to start.  The most challenging part may be to set aside the cognitive dissonance for awhile and allow my beliefs to be effectively tested.  The reward is a sense of personal value based on actual experience rather than whatever I invent inside my own head.  In other words, the high stakes are worth the challenge. 

Ghost Stories

Until we sell our house in Houston, our entertainment budget in Fort Worth is a bit scant.  Luckily, when we tire of board games and Netflix, we are easily entertained by free museums, theaters with great matinee prices, and drives down country roads.  As far as the drives go, Joy is enamored with bluebonnets, which are plentiful this time of year, and I am on the lookout for cemeteries and ghost towns.  It seems that every community has its own folklore about hauntings and spooky supernatural occurrences, and although I consider myself to be an open-minded skeptic, those ghost stories are still fascinating to me.  

Thus, when we made the move to Fort Worth, I was given a book all about the area's haunted locales, and when a friend came to visit on Friday, we decided to check out a couple of spots the author highlighted.  The first was Carter, Texas, a town that doesn't exist anymore except for some historical markers, an old church building, and an open-air, tin-roofed gathering area the author calls a "tabernacle".  According to the book, the ghosts of a couple of children supposedly still played in the area, but we discovered something that the author neglected to publicize.  At one end of the tabernacle stood an ancient piano, the victim of weather and neglect.

Ghost town piano detail

An old ghost town piano

Of course, I tried to play a few tunes on the decrepit instrument, and of course, they sounded creepily dissonant.  Although we didn't hear any ghostly children, we did hear sounds of living children and livestock from nearby farms.  It was easy to imagine how such noises, made ethereal by distance and intervening vegetation, could seem like spectral entities on a dark, quiet night in what remains of Carter.  But the fact that the author didn't mention the old piano surprised me.  It's not like anyone would travel miles out of the way to see a broken-down musical instrument, and given that the locals likely already knew about it, that old piano seems a strange thing to keep secret.  Given what I know about children and pianos, if there truly were any juvenile spirits hanging around, they would be hard pressed to resist the urge to play it (or bang on it, depending on your perspective).  Still, prowling around the ghost town and reading the historical markers was quite cool, and the discovery of the poor old piano was indeed a treat.

The author of my Fort Worth ghost book also mentioned a cemetery not far from Carter which boasts a glowing tombstone.  According to what he wrote, "the phenomenon is consistent, night after night, regardless of the weather or any other conditions that might affect it."  From his own personal account, this tombstone, supposedly 50 yards into the graveyard and clearly visible from the road, was "blazing away in ghostly iridescence."  We decided to check out this "consistent phenomenon" for ourselves, since we were already close by.  The experience was somewhat disappointing.  Although we waited outside the cemetery gates for awhile after the sun had completely disappeared, we never saw anything glowing with the intensity the author described.  We chalked up the alleged glow to some kind of optical illusion, but there was simply nothing there for us to see.

Which got me thinking about why a person would publish a story that was so easy to verify as false.  The Carter stories are par for the course: On certain nights, if you listen carefully, you may hear the ghostly voices of the children of Carter.  That kind of story might have people returning and hanging around time and again (although I can't say that such visits would benefit the local economy in any way).  To suggest that one visiting the cemetery would experience something specific with absolute certainty, no matter the time of year or weather conditions, is just a silly claim.  But we accept all kinds of silly claims all the time without verifying them, so stories about glowing tombstones seem like small potatoes.  

In fact, I think I have accepted a great many "ghost stories" as true, without bothering to verify them for myself, and I'm not talking about glowing tombstones and underage specters at this point.  From Hollywood movies to church pulpits to popular songs to adages that are somehow just floating through the collective unconscious of society, there are so many stories about how people should be.  I have fallen prey to other people's beliefs about what a husband should be, what an artist should be, what a responsible adult should be, what a friend should be, what kind of music I should be writing, what kind of connections I should be making, and on and on.  And as many times as I have accepted other people's beliefs, I have rebelled against them just to be defiant.  I know that most people mean well when they share their beliefs about such things, and I know that most people are convinced that what they share is steeped in truth.  Still, it takes a bit of work to peel back all of the layers of ghost stories that have covered my perspective of what my life is supposed to be like.  

Stories about glowing tombstones are easy to verify.  You drive up to the cemetery and you look out across the gravestones and visually determine if one of them has an eerie green ghostly blaze.  It takes an inner eye to verify all of the folktales about more mundane subjects, how men or women are supposed to act, how success should be defined, what one must do in order to be a valued member of society, and why that is of paramount importance.  Maybe some people find it easy to disregard such stories, but I know some people that take such beliefs very seriously.  Some of them might be true for me, but I will only know that for sure if I take those ideas from external sources and verify them against what makes sense to me personally.  If I don't see the glow, then I know that's one more ghost story someone just made up.  Otherwise, I am essentially always measuring my life by someone else's ruler, and sometimes it seems that no two rulers agree.

I will most likely keep enjoying ghost stories and my own amateur investigations of supernatural folklore, but I haven't come across one yet that has turned out to be verifiably accurate.  Likewise, I'll keep testing other people's beliefs that have made their way into my psyche.  Hopefully, I can peel away the ones that don't make sense to me and hang on to the ones that ring true.

In Sync with Me

Jung's concept of synchronicity is a featured concept in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I have been working through with a few friends over the past several weeks.  Essentially, synchronicity is "the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner."  In other words, seemingly connected events that don't have a high probability of happening concurrently.  While I am much more prone to labeling such things as coincidences unless they are uncannily pertinent to what I'm doing personally, I have been trying to notice when events seem to be lining up in a significant way.  Perhaps this willingness and intentionality on my part has contributed to a feeling of being "in sync" with my life.

Most theories of personal growth and development postulate an even number of phases, cycling through focusing inward and focusing on something external.  The first phase is usually something akin to survival, concentrating all of one's energy toward getting the basic necessities.  A second phase (if one is able to trust that survival will happen) is often adopting an external set of rules or goals, whether they originate from a church, a political organization, or some other institution with established beliefs.  The next phase would be integrating the meaningful beliefs from outside oneself into a period of defining personal identity.  And once deeper self-actualization has taken place, the following phase would address how to engage with the broader society, or at least some portion of it.  I can see this pattern at work when I look backward at my journey, but I have often been wrestling with whatever phase I've been in.

When I was clearly (looking back) in phases of clarifying personal values, I was also often struggling to engage more purposefully with a larger group.  And sometimes when I have accepted a prominent role within a larger group, I have found myself confronted with challenges about what beliefs are most meaningful to me personally.  While the internal and external work can be in balance, I have frequently tried to force myself to focus in a particular direction when I wasn't actually in the "right" phase to do so.  I have wanted to guard against being focused too narrowly and missing some important piece of personal doctrine.  Certain beliefs about what life "ought" to be about have served better at some junctures than others.  To put it another way, I haven't always been willing to let myself grow because I was afraid of what beliefs I might grow out of.

Everyone has a doctrine—a system of beliefs they live by.  Some piece of a person's doctrine may be incorporated from external sources, and some may come from an internal sense of what's important or how things should be.  But at some point, the beliefs have to become personal if they are going to have deep value.  Living by a doctrine that someone else created for you doesn't reflect integrity.  That's just a sort of irresponsible obedience.  Integrity comes from taking a personal stand for one's own life, claiming a personal set of beliefs not to judge right and wrong in others but to identify what has true personal value.

At some points in my life, the beliefs that primarily informed my decisions were actually different from what I thought I should believe.  I was in conflict with my own doctrine, but I didn't realize it at the time.  Now, I have been taking time to really think about what beliefs are really potent for me.  I have been giving myself permission to be honest about what's most important to me, without worrying about what might get left behind if I focus in a direction that has personal importance.  Trusting myself, with some confidence in what I have been recognizing as valuable for me, I find a strange appropriate-ness in the opportunities I am creating and discovering.

While I may have told myself so in the past as a reassurance or believed it intellectually, I feel in a very deep way that I am in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment in my life.  It's not synchronicity, but I believe that noticing the "rightness" of my experience comes from being conscious of my personal doctrine and aware of how I am able to engage life in a meaningful way.  And when I know that what I believe makes sense, fear has a lot less of a foothold.