Slow, time, and creativity
The more I think about slowing down, the more my thoughts veer toward creativity. The creative process needs time. Healing takes time. Growth takes time, so does learning something new.
The body has its own rhythms. If you injure yourself, how long does it take to get better? You can’t exactly plan a date in which you will be healed no matter how much effort you put in. The best you can do is to look after yourself, but the body will go at its own pace. It can’t be rushed. Time is the great healer.
Creativity needs unstructured time. But what is creativity? Is it creating something new? Is it originality? It certainly is generative. Sir Ken Robinson, a wise educator, says creativity is an imaginative process leading to original results that are of value.
Imagination is something that is innate, but also needs respect and cultivation. Imagination can easily be destroyed by a mechanistic education. Imagination is something authentic and personal. No one else can have our imagination for us. Creativity is a way of being in the world. It’s not goal oriented: it’s a process.
So what is this creative process? It starts off with activity without direction, or at least not much direction. It’s important to tolerate vagueness. Everyone’s process will be different. My experience is with painting, drawing, and writing. When writing, I make notes in my notebook. Some of these are sentence fragments. I keep a notebook by my bed. Some of my most imaginative ideas have come to me in that state between sleep and waking.
I don’t worry too much about grammar at this point. I can’t because I am sometimes half asleep. But I certainly do pay attention to grammar later on in the refining stage. Just getting words on paper is the first step for me. These initial ideas are the springboard to other ideas. There is a sense of play. This is a private world so I have complete freedom to write any way I please. How often do we get such freedom? It’s only later, after several revisions, does the completed work appear.
Only by not rushing to some pre-defined goal do I slow down enough to be present and play. And what is play? It’s trying things out. It’s practice. You see young animals playing at fighting and defending themselves. It’s preparation for adult life and it’s enjoyable. At least, kittens or puppies seemed to be enjoying themselves.
The direction comes from the process, it’s not something imposed from outside, like following a set of instructions.
Learning something new takes time. It’s easy to become used to instant gratification. Learning requires effort and perseverance. But what are our expectations for the amount of effort we must put in? It took a lot of effort to learn to walk. It took a lot of effort to learn to speak. Growing and learning are slow processes. If you enjoy the process, you’re more likely to continue to do it. If you’re in a rush to attain a specific goal and don’t enjoy the process, you’re far less likely to continue in that direction once you have fulfilled a requirement. How many people took the wrong major in college?
No one knows what the future will bring. It won’t be like the past. Seven years ago Google never existed. Who could have predicted the world we now live in? But one thing is for sure, we need imagination and creativity. For those things, we need to take the time to slow down.
The process… the journey… the playing… the exploring… the creating… the being… the meditating… the breathing… the travelling… the stopping… the sleeping… the dreaming… the imagining… the forming… the living… the seeing… the hearing… the floating… the drifting… the imbibing… the loving… the speaking… the listening… the flying… the wondering… the wandering… the wishing… the enjoying… the feeling… the cleansing…
The… slowing…… down………
I’ve been working on taking more time on tasks and it really has been helping to increase creativity.
Hi Modern-Worker:
Thanks for the comment. If you don’t mind, I’d like to know more about your creative process. Now you have allocated more time, then what happens?
Yours in slowness,
Christopher
Hello,
I really enjoyed your post.
I just started taking a medication that is making it difficult to concentrate.
So, I am trying to slow down and enunciate my efforts, so to speak.
Thanks for your direction in this post!
truly,
Sylvia C.
Congratulations. Your website and blog are everything I would like to write but coulnd’t be bothered (yet).
I, like you think that tea and biscuits are the answer to a lot of the frantic culture. Must be loose leaf though and brewed idly and then savoured with a fave book.
Some thoughts on active slowing down (not a contradiction in terms!). When you have a typical frantic BMW driver hard up your behind, automatically slow down and keep rigidly to national speed limit, or 50 mph just to emphasise the point. Cruise along and occasionally observe the mounting frustration and anger behind you. Do not yield, and put on some soporific new age music to ensure you stay chilled.
Better still, don’t drive anywhere unless you have to and stay at home drinking tea.
Nick,
I agree about not driving unless you have to. Of course drinking tea makes sense. Slow driving is a subject worthy of at least a post. However, we share the road with just about all of humanity and while I agree with you that driving at or slightly below the speed limit is ideal, I wouldn’t want to antagonize those who are afflicted by hurry. Rushing about often goes undiagnosed and the economic and health consequences are often serious. Road rage is a reality.
Hi Sylvia, thanks for reading.
Christopher
Nice to discover other slowed down people. Jerry Mander used to say that “In our society, speed is celebrated as if it were a virtue in itself”. I wrote about how to welcome writer’s block in my blog as a way to boost creativity. I suspect that our society is crazy with speed since Christianity have the idea of just one single life on this earth. General impatience then is understandable.
Hello Ivo,
I would recommend Jerry Mander’s book. If I remember rightly, there is a bit in it about how we become mesmerized by the TV and we are unaware of our bodies. This is particularly dangerous if you eat while watching. You don’t realize what is happening and overeat.
But I don’t want to be someone that tells others what to do. I have my preferences.
There are people, probably most, who can watch violence on the news at night and then drift off to a heavenly place of dreams and wake up refreshed and grateful for the dawn. People are different.
Speed is seen as a virtue. Microsoft’s slogan is Do More, Faster. I call it time-greed. It’s so darn hard to give things up; and it seems so natural to want to fill up every moment of a day.
Slow is not for sissies.
Thanks, yes I know his books and they are still valid nowadays. Personally I don’t have a television, I saw how the dumbing power of television in Italy could create a prime minister from nothing. But I’m not quite sure Internet itself is actually that democratic and decentralizing instrument that most of the people think it is. Yes we all have blogs but big media are even bigger. Then, the attention deficit desordered attitude of scanning information doesn’t promote deep thinking.
Ivo,
We create our own world, and those worlds are diverse and idiosyncratic. I am much taken with the idea of territory. Art is finding a territory of ones own. Once that is done, then we find community within its boundaries.
Mass media will always talk with a loud voice and influence the masses. Even if the majority of people don’t have time to read, there are many that make it a priority.
My point is that some people you’ll connect with and others you won’t. Blogs self select an audience. All these diverse voices make the internet the rich place it is. We can simply turn off what we find boring, uninteresting, vacuous, or dogmatic.
People are different.