Tough Love

“I used to think that self-care meant taking it easy, pampering myself, and avoiding things when stress hit. Now I know that doing the thing I'm most afraid to do is the best way to take care of myself.”
--Cory Fransway, from Judith Wright's More e-zine



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How to Expand Your Mind: Doodle

I'm a near-constant doodler. Now I discover that there's neurological evidence that doodling helps us think, solve problems, listen better, and keep better perspective. All of which helps out a lot when one is practicing boldness, creativity, and courage.

First, I discovered at White Cafe a review of a book, Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson. "Best of all, though (the book) contains delightful observations and insights, it isn't drowning in advice, but is mainly focused on fun, free-ranging exercises that plunge you straight into a world of creative experimentation."

The amazing doodly drawings resulting from these at White Cafe led me to go looking for any info on what doodling is coming from and leading to. What I learned in a nutshell in the 9 minute video, doodling: langage, gesture, and cognition, is: there's evidence that speech came, at least in part, from gesture rather than primitive vocalizations. And doodling is gesture. It uses motor skills.

The idea, simplistically put, is that doodling contacts and uses more of our own native creativity and communication equipment. In my experience, it just calms me down, allows for focus.

My first memory is of doodling. I was a toddler of late two or early three, out in the backyard squatting on a bare patch of dirt. I was wearing a sunsuit with a ruffly butt and making marks in the dirt with one wobbly little finger, the other arm held out in the air like an outrigger for balance. My mother and a neighbor were standing near.

I've always wondered why I remembered that. Now I have some support for the importance of making marks in dirt.

From the blog, Consider This: "Doodling taught me to say yes to the spontaneous me, no matter how dumb or clumsy the line was on the paper. By allowing one line to lead to another, by letting the drawing inform me instead of the other way around, I came to appreciate a vastly wider horizon of possibility for me and my world."

A few of my recent doodles: the intricate one below was drawn while listening to a novelist read a chapter of her work aloud for critical feedback, the orange gingerbread angel above is my notes of feedback on my own work, and the lines and circles were done in a class I was teaching while the participants are writing for a few minutes. Definitely three different states of mind.

Drawing the crowded one made it so much easier for me to listen to the reader. I felt as if all distracting thoughts were channeled onto the page and did not interrupt me.

Once many years ago, I wrote an article on root doctors for Sepia magazine. One of the healers I interviewed drew circles and spirals and swoops the entire time we were talking. It was entrancing for both of us.

It was pretty bold of the man to do it. I've found that in face-to-face conversations with clients, they sometimes look alarmed if I take up my artwork. Office supplies stores should sell signs that say Doodling Helps Me Think. Or maybe I could simply speak up.




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One Small Step Today

A phrase I heard in a Creative Capital seminar about a year ago has stuck with me: No goal too large, no step too small.

The point is that all the steps toward the goal count, and if we keep taking them, they steadily accumulate and also inspire larger leaps. If we faithfully take one step each day and keep on and on, it's amazing how far we can go.

Last week wandering around the charming downtown of the tiny NC mountain community of Sylva I remembered this saying. All it took was the sight of the county courthouse, which has the most steps I've ever seen on a public building still in use.

(The Acropolis has a sort of winding trail up, and those pyramids in Mexico are a shockingly steep climb but you don't have to go there to buy a marriage license etc. so the trip is optional.)

Had I had a helicopter I could have shot a picture that did these steps justice; there are in fact a couple of more flights beynond the statue that may look like the top. That's also the way with most projects I've undertaken: there are a few extra sets of steps thrown in, not visible from the start. So just when you think you've arrived...there's still more climbing.
All of this is to say: Take a step today toward your big, big goal. Even a tiny one will put you closer.




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Today's Bold Move

I find that if I'm a tad cheeky about my choice of little things, it fires me up to be gutsier and more imaginative about more important things.

So today getting dressed I discovered that, to avoid the unseemly bare midriff, this sweater needed more than the one button the hip manufacturer provided.

Hidden safety pins didn't work at all.

My cool solution (oh, I'm so pleased) was a couple of pins of the decorative sort. The possibilities are tremendous: we could do this with political buttons. Two Barack Obama buttons, or two Hillary Clinton buttons, as the case may be.

Campaigners, listen up! I hope you jump on this idea. It's yours at no charge.



These "buttons" are acting as booster rockets to my day.

Any little boldness boosters of your own you'd be willing to pass on?





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How To Ward Off Writer's Block

“The second that I think that I have a fear of writing, (I think) ‘No, no, this is just a joyous thing to sit down and tell a story,’” he said.

This is the strategy of writer and fourth grade teacher Ross Modlin, as reported by Cameron Macdonald in The Elk Grove Citizen in Elk Grove, California.

I like simple strategies the best. The complicated ones just seem an additional burden.

This one is flexible because we could take the beginning of the sentence and finish it with anything that needs unsticking.

For example: This is just a joyous thing to design a new course...to begin the revisions that will make this piece so much stronger...to draw a picture....

Also, note that Modlin uses this thought the instant he notices fear coming on.

(The teacher who helped me the most toward becoming a writer was also named Modlin--Mildred Modlin, teaching in Wilmington, NC in the 1960s. So I'm predisposed to thinking this fellow is offering good advice.

One other auspicious sign: Elk Grove was a home base for many gold miners during the Gold Rush. Of course practicing any art is a process of mining for the gold.)

So today's work is just a joyous thing: to go digging for gold, in the company of other miners scattered here and there about the land.



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A Bold Idea: Sabbatical

I can now shut up about the fact that when I was in high school I was not selected to go to Governor's School in the summer. In the last week I got my own mini-Governor's School.

About 25 years ago, North Carolina Teacher of the Year Jean Powell suggested in a speech that there be a sort of Governor's School for teachers. The (few and fortunate) high-performing high school kids chosen each year to attend this advanced and fabulously enriching boarding school session always came back so excited about learning.

So, Powell said, why not do the same thing for teachers? And send them back to the classroom re-excited about teaching and learning.

Then-Governor Jim Hunt jumped on the idea and the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching was born.

This week I've been teaching a class here called "Write from your Roots." I feel I'm the one who is refreshed and re-excited about learning...and about my own teaching and writing and living.

The 22 guests--teachers, counselors, and librarians--and the staff I worked with here (Jane Dalton, author of The Compassionate Classroom and Tara Melton-Miller) could teach anybody anything. I hope the "students" have gotten even a fraction of the good from the experience that I have.

If you happen to work for the NC public schools, take a bold step and apply to come here. There's a magic chemistry happening on this 30-acre mountain campus--and no doubt at the coastal Ocracoke site as well.

If you aren't eligible, TAKE A BOLD STEP AND FIND YOUR OWN SABBATICAL SOMEWHERE. Even a few days can be a small lifetime tucked into the big one.

Thanks to Jean Powell who boldly spoke up about a good idea and to Jim Hunt who said: let's do it. And to the Legislature that helps it continue. And of course to NCCAT.

Woohoo! I'm coming back! Take that, Governor's School selection panel of 1965-66!



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A Creativity Site Recommendation

Kay from California just sent an address to a mind-stirring site from the guy who wrote A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative, just re-released in a 25th anniversary edition.

The same fellow also produced the Creative Whack Pack, a set of cards with 64 different imaginative idea-producing strategies and the Ball of Whacks, "a creativity workshop in a ball."

I have a set of those cards in my bottom desk drawer, but I'd never before gone looking for the site: Creative Think by Roger von Oech. It's a plenty lively place.

In a recent post, von Oech suggests having a "mantra" for your work, but using the word more in the sense of a motto. His is "Look for a second right answer." That's bound to produce interesting outcomes, and it contains a strategy not simply a goal.

My own is "Go after the best result," with the fuller version being: "I unhesitatingly, serenely, joyfully go after the best result." I want to figure out a way to build in the kind of strategy his offers. I'm convinced that having a pithy statement of guiding principle installed in my brain is a bit like having a centerboard in a sailboat.





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Make A Mistake Today!

This quote arrived at the bottom of an email this week:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams

I love the idea because it's true and it has the potential to take away the destructive performance pressure so many of us put on ourselves.

Having read this item and pondered it, I then went looking for the identity of the to-me mysterious Scott Adams. Turns out he's famous: the creator of Dilbert.
He's also quite an aphorist. Brainy Quote has a long list of good sayings from him, ranging from wry to inspiring.

Here's another sample from the inspirational end of his spectrum: "Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive."




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