Daphne Cohn

where I riff on what I'm reading

[daphnecohn]

on becoming an artist, part two

a book by Ellen Langer, mindfulness expert, on “reinventing yourself through mindful creativity.”

I am a mom so I understand mindlessness.

My kids come home and it’s the end of the day and I’m tired. I tell myself, “Be present for them.” But often I find my mind wandering as the details of their day slip through the crevices of my thoughts. I nod, “uh huh,” and return as slyly as I can to the world inside my head. Later I berate myself for my absence. I tell myself, “This time is fleeting, show up for it.”

I’ve often wondered if my kids can tell, pretty certain that they can.

Ellen Langer, as part of her research into mindfulness and creativity, wondered the same thing.

Ellen writes:

When we are mindful, do others know?... We often feel we can tell when someone is pretending to think or feel a certain way. When people are pretending they are following a script written in the past, and scripted behavior is, typically mindless behavior.

Later she carried this into art and I’ll get to that.

This is what Ellen found: not only can people tell when someone is mindfully present but mindfulness has its own charm. We find mindful people more charismatic, respectable, and likable.

And when we’re not mindful? Here’s how kids respond... 

Children spoken to by mindless adults “led to a drop in the children’s self-esteem. They felt less competent, were less willing to help others, and had some negative feelings toward the adult when the adult was mindless.”

Ouch.

Now comes the piece about art.

Do we notice when someone is creating art mindlessly? And does it matter?

Ellen and her research team divided people into two groups. The first group was asked to draw a dog and then make several copies of the drawing. The assumption being that the act of copying would make each drawing better than the last.

Then they took a second group and had them engage in the same exercise only told them to make subtle changes to the last drawing in ways that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone but themselves.

The idea was to bring more mindfulness into the process by having the artist make something new, and thus create more mindfully, the last drawing.

Then they showed the drawings of the two groups to another group that knew nothing of the experiment. And what they found was this:

The viewers preferred the drawings that had been subtly changed. They couldn’t decipher the changes but something about the drawing was different and they responded to that. The drawings from the first group simply became more rote and, therefore, less interesting.

Ellen writes:

We found that people do indeed prefer art that is mindfully created. It is less perfect and more pleasing. This will be a theme we return to again and again: we seek perfection and get frozen by the thought of our imperfection. This is ironic in that the outcomes we seek are more likely to come to our imperfect selves.

Isn’t that interesting?

So many of us don’t make our thing because we think we’re not good enough. Or we spend ages on it reaching for perfection. And yet, what we most appreciate in the work of another is not the ideal achieved by endless repetition but the imperfection of our uniqueness achieved through mindful creativity.

I found this insight incredibly inspiring and the needed kick in the butt to wake up, show up, and stay present with my kids and my art.

Because people notice.

And it matters.

[daphnecohn]

on becoming an artist, part one

a book by Ellen Langer, mindfulness expert, on “reinventing yourself through mindful creativity.” 

I have been intrigued by mindfulness for a long time now. When I was 21 I lived on an ashram in Indonesia for two months where we practiced mindfulness through meditation, yoga, and picking endless kapok seeds out of cotton. 

When I was 26 I lived at a Buddhist Zen Center in Northern California for three years where we practiced mindfulness by sitting and staring at white walls for hours. 

When I came across Ellen Langer’s book: On Becoming An Artist: reinventing yourself through mindful creativity, I wasn’t interested in the reinvention but I wanted to know about mindful creativity. 

Ellen’s an expert in mindfulness, writing and teaching about it since the 70′s. Long before it was hip to write and teach about mindfulness.

In On Becoming An Artist, Ellen begins her plunge into mindfulness and creativity with mindlessness.

Because before we can understand how to be mindfully creative we have to know what mindless creativity looks like.

According to Ellen it looks like two things: repetition and unquestioning acceptance of things as they are.

Ellen writes:

The second way in which we become mindless is particularly important: when we hear or read something and accept it without question. Most of what we know about our world or ourselves we have mindlessly learned in exactly this way. 

We don’t stop and ask: why? Does this make sense? Do I care? When did I learn this? Who taught me? Why did they believe it?

We accept so much and question so little.

When I was 40 I moved to Davis, CA. I’d gone to school there in my twenties and had fond memories. I loved college.

At 40, married and a mom of two kids, Davis was very different. It was suburbia.

And it sucked.

But it made me question: success, my values, my friendships, my ideas of who I am and what I care about.

In short, it woke me up.

That’s what I love about mindful creativity.

We go through school and we learn right and wrong, rules and behaviors, and answers. So many answers.

We stop asking questions.

Then we try to create something: something new, something interesting, something alive.

But we’ve grown accustomed to answers.

And so what we make feels stale, heavy with expectations and ideas of good and bad, should and shouldn’t, art and not art.

Or we don’t make at all because the ideas of good and bad, should and shouldn’t, art and not art, paralyze us before we even start.

That’s mindless creativity.

Mindful creativity invites, no demands, questions.

What is good? Bad? And what does it matter? Who taught me shoulds and shouldn’ts? And how can they know. And art, who decides what is art and what is isn’t?

When we start asking the questions we wake up to the ridiculousness of the answers. There is no way to know. We must decided for ourselves, after question, what we think is good or bad, art or not art, and then keep asking so that we never get locked inside of a world of answers.

That is mindful creativity. 

Or at least the first piece of it. To be continued...

[daphnecohn]

photo source: Mickey O’Neil

- Courtney E. Martin, The Potential in the Pregnant Pause

[daphnecohn]

He is reminded [...] that he has made his way, that he has his own part to play in it all: the oiling of cogs, in the handshakes that lead to the lunches that lead to the buying and selling that lead to the acquisition of influence, to the stake in governance that results in the eventual spinning of the world on its axis. He can make things work. At this, he is undoubtably a success.

Paradise City by Elizabeth Day 

[daphnecohn]

I have been thinking a lot about paying attention.

Because I know that paying attention is where creativity resides. It’s also the best way to get inside the question, “What does it mean to be human?”

So I read a book called On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz and wrote about it here. 

And then I listened to an interview between Horowitz and one of my favorite minds, Maria Popova on brainpicker.org. Brain Picker is where Popova gathers all the audio excerpts posted on her blog, brain pickings.

In this interview Popova and Horowitz go down some fairly intricate rabbit holes including: choice, productivity, and, of course, attention.

The thing about listening to Popova conduct an interview is that half of what it is worth noting comes from Popova.

@9:57 min -  In this instance I found Popova’s question of Horowitz more engaging than Horowitz’ answer. She asks:

Susan Sontag once said that a writer is a professional observer. And I love that. I love that. I love it because it also implies that a high degree of observation is really what sets the writer apart from the average person to whom that is either attainable or only attainable through a lot of practice. You are a writer who wrote about the art of observation for ordinary people so I wonder how writing that book made you, or didn’t make you, a better writer?

I don’t mean to be dismissive of Horowitz, because I have tremendous respect for her, but I honestly don’t recall the answer. It was something along the lines of increasing her awareness of humans.

Then Popova read a section from the beginning of On Looking. I include the section here as it led into a very interesting conversation on productivity, presence, and a life worth remembering.

@14:25 min - Here is the passage:

Right now you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all your senses: the hum of the fluorescent light, the ambient noise in the large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension your holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places of your body, the constant hum of traffic or distant lawn mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, the chirp of a bug, or whine of a kitchen appliance.

@16:20 min - Popova asks Horowitz about the act of attending to all of these things and the craziness of trying to.

If we attended to all of those things… I don’t think that we would be able to move forward so much in our world. In other words I want us to be able to acknowledge them but it would be considered disorderly… to attend to all of those at the same time at every moment. We value a type of productivity in mind and in work and in day, and we value a certain way of going through the day. It involves tuning a lot out so that you can focus on the task at hand and complete. Which is a very linear model. Which is not a child’s model.

What follows is a captivating discussion on productivity and presence and how the two can coexist. I would love to quote it all here but it is several minutes long. So instead I encourage you to listen in around 19 minutes. I’ve also included one of my favorite quotes here. 

@25:10 min - Then they spoke about mindfulness and I found this very instructive. It can be too easy to use “not noticing everything” as another tool of the ego to chastise and criticize one’s practice. But here we see that mindfulness does not need to, nor could not, include everything.

Mindfulness wasn’t about noticing every thing in every moment. which is I think important because it shouldn’t come off as a mandate. Instead it was about having some experience of presence… no one notices everything.

@38:54 min - In the end Horowitz acknowledges the challenges around working with something as vague as “paying attention.” 

I think this idea of attention… it really is something about the way we work, it’s something at the core of who we are. How we are going to understand the world is what we think of attention, how we wield attention, if we know how to wield attention, if we have control of our attention, what type of thing can fit into our attention.

It’s actually a somewhat confusing subject that I don’t think has been clarified well. We use the word as though we know what we’re talking about,or that we know how to do it. How to attend. But we don’t really know how to attend well.

No, we don’t. But if there is one thing I learned from On Looking, it’s that attention is a skill. The more we practice it, the better we get at it.

[daphnecohn]

I value the moments in my life that are productive certainly but only the ones that are productive and also present… it doesn’t have to be either/or but, as it turns out, I’ve spent time in a job where you then wonder a year later, what happened to that year.  If I had bothered to sit on the subway commuting to my office, looking, looking, I think that those moments would have been memorialized and I would have known what had happened to that year. It could have been productive but also present. I don’t mean to be testifying against productivity per se, but I do see that it is certainly mindless the way that we approach there being only one root to living one’s life. It is within us, this capacity to alter that at any moment, even within that framework.

- Alexandra Horowitz as interviewed by Maria Popova on brainpicker.org

[daphnecohn]

- The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

[daphnecohn]

Here’s what we crave. We crave truth tellers. We crave real truth. There is so much baloney all the time. You know, the performance of political speech, of speeches you see on the news, doesn’t it often feel to you like there should be a thought bubble over it that says, “what I really would say if I could say it is...”

- Elizabeth Alexander, Poet

source: Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippet

[daphnecohn]

I’m a big fan of transformation. When it sticks. It just that it usually doesn’t. Which is frustrating and demoralizing and makes me want to give up. 

Fortunately there are folks like Jim Bunch. People who don’t give up and instead figure out a really cool solution for creating lasting transformation. Seriously. 

In this interview on the Unmistakeable Creative, Jim tells us exactly how to create change that sticks. 

@9:00 min - Jim was a big personal growth guy. He worked with Tony Robbins for a while. He then went on to form his own business with Bob Proctor and John Assaraf, two other powerhouses in the personal growth movement. The business was successful but Jim grew increasingly disillusioned with the industry.

I lost faith in that industry because I saw thousands of people getting excited, getting pumped up every weekend…but I realized these people weren’t actually changing…they weren’t transforming their lives.

@9:29 min - And here’s why:

What we found was that about 4% of the population can use will power and drive and force to change their behavior. 96% of the population goes through this up-down, up-down, up-down…they end up balancing back to the same equilibrium they had before… It’s the cycle.

@12:01 min - Jim wanted to figure out a way to break the cycle. He met a coach named Thomas Leonard. Thomas taught Jim how to make change last.

Most of these people are trying to use willpower to change their life instead of designing environments… I want you to imagine for a moment that everything that you see, hear, taste, touch, smell, that everything is an environment… These environments are working on you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And here, @15:36 min, Jim further clarifies this point:

Environments are stronger than will power. Environments will always win over will power because they work on you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but your will power, your desire to change is only on when you are thinking about it.

@13:50 min - So what do you do? This:

You need to learn how to do life by design instead of by default. Doing life by design means that you decide how you want to live and then you simply design the environments to pull you into the bigger you… When you start upgrading and redesigning your environments, everything changes.

@14:30 min - This was my favorite explanation of environments because it speaks most directly to how each environment is affecting your health, your happiness and your wealth:

Everybody has environments and they are either inspiring you or they are expiring you. They are either adding energy or they are draining energy. They are either increasing your focus or they are decreasing your focus.

Instead of trying to use willpower to change results and change behaviors what if you designed environments that caused you naturally to be pulled into a better you? That caused you naturally to be inspired?

My coach says that everything is either empowering or disempowering, there is no neutral. We like to think there is a neutral because it means we don’t have to pay constant attention, not everything matters. But Jim and my coach would disagree. And I’m starting to feel the same.

@19:36 min - The other point Jim spoke to that really resonated was on values: knowing one’s values and creating value in the world.

What I learned later on is that regardless of the financial success that I’d had, what really became the most important thing for me was to live a values-driven life. When I say values I mean the things that are subconsciously motivating me… In my life when I am clear on my values…and I design my environments to express my values, life works.

@20:44 min - And if we don’t know our values, life can fall apart.

Most people are running around out there trying to reach success, trying to motivate themselves… If they don’t know their values, I can promise you they are going to return back to their old behaviors within six months.

@24:48 min -  Once you know your values, says Jim, the next most important step for real, lasting success, is to provide value.

If I keep my focus on creating more value for more people, and I challenge myself to do that every day, then the universe works in my favor. I’m creating so much reciprocity from the universe that it has to return to me. But the moment I put all the attention and focus on me, it shuts off the valve. It shuts off the flow.

Right around @33 min Jim and Srini dive deeper into how to design an environment so that one achieves optimal performance and happiness. For that listen to the second half of the interview as well as Jim’s follow-up interview here.

The follow-up interview is fantastic as well: breaking down each of the nine environments in very specific, tangible, actionable ways. Jim starts breaking it down around 13 min.

Real transformation. Lasting change.

[daphnecohn]

Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery. 

- William Steig, Caldecott Award Acceptance Speech, 1970

[daphnecohn]

I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home form school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.

- Truman Capote

[daphnecohn]

Naval Ravikant is a big name in the angel investing, start-up world of silicon valley. Which is probably why I’d never heard of him. Not my world.

But this interview - this is my world. It’s philosophy and growth and how to be a happy, healthy, whole human being.

@11:10 min - Naval begins the interview talking about happiness and success and the difference between the two:

We are told that the American Dream  will bring you happiness. It will not… Happiness is internal. Happiness is a skill that you develop. So how do you do that?

@18:24 min - Happiness, Naval believes, comes two things:

As I get older in life I realize that a lot of happiness is just being present and… you realize that to live in the present moment is the highest calling. It is the source of all happiness. When you are not honest with someone else, or when you even withhold something in your mind what you’ve done is you’ve created a second thought process… that then has to stay active. You have to keep track of what you’ve said versus what you’re really thinking. That takes you out of the moment and it brings you unhappiness over time… If you really want to be happy you have to be present. And one of the core tenants of being present is to be completely honest at all times.

Honesty + presence = happiness. Nice.

@38:27 min - Here Naval talks about the discipline and skill development required to maintain any level of honesty, presence or happiness.

I don’t believe in the epiphany theory of self-development, where you read some book and have an incredible epiphany. You read some phrase and say, “That’s great. This changes my life.”… Life doesn’t work that way. What you have to do is you have to build skills. I think happiness is a skill, nutrition is a skill,… self-awareness is a skill. Skills get built up over decades with feedback loops and you just have to constantly keep working on it.

@77:17 min - And to build skills you need habits.

Habits are everything. Everything. We are trained in habits from when we were children… behaviors that we learned and that we then integrated into our selves… You become your habits. It’s all about habits… There is nothing else.

The best book I know on habit building is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. That book set in motion habits have changed my life. Some day I’ll write about it. In the meantime read the book or check out B.J. Fogg’s site tiny habits.

@81:10 min - Naval on the honesty required for real change. And how to start so that you actually make it happen:

Whenever we say, I’m going to try to do something, or I’m going to form a habit… we are sort of wimping out. We are just saying to ourselves, “I’m going to buy myself some more time so I can just limp along”… When you are self-aware you can say, “I say I want to do this but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, i would just do it”…. When you really want to change you just change but most of us don’t really want to change… so recognize it, be aware of it, and then give yourself a smaller change that you can actually carry out.

Naval and Tim philosophize about a lot during this interview. If you want to dive deep into Naval’s mind listen to the whole interview. I think it’s worth it. But if you don’t have the time, then allow me just two more highlights.

@103:50 min - The first is reading. I’m an avid reader. Reading made me want to write. Reading shows me other worlds. And reading teaches me how to be human. Here’s Naval’s thoughts, and best tips, on reading.

The real education begins in the library, begins with books. If you can learn to like to read you never need to go to school… You just have to think about two things: One is don’t feel the need to read anything you don’t want to read. Read the stuff that is fun to you because it’s more important to form the habit and the practice and the enjoyment of reading and to associate it with something positive rather than negative… Secondly don’t feel the obligation to finish any book… feel free to skip around, it’s your book… that freedom allows me to read.

I love that. Only read what is fun. Don’t feel the need to finish a book you don’t like. And skip around. It’s your book after all.

@124:32 min - And lastly, Naval’s thoughts on desire which brings us back to honesty, presence and how to be happy.

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most people realize that is what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we are unhappy.

I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time… I also realize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that’s where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.

And this:

Accept. Just accept. In any situation in life you always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it or you can leave it. Those are your three options. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it or not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion that is responsible for most of our misery so probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is just telling myself one word: Accept. Anytime I look at myself and I’m judging something I just say accept.

If this isn’t enough Naval did a follow-up session on Tim’s podcast. A Q & A with the listeners. There is so much there. You can get that here.

[daphnecohn]

[daphnecohn]

For Checkhov, morality lay not in our relationships with what we know, but in how admirably we deal with what we don't. In the face of what we don't understand, his stories ask, how curious are we?... It's this sort of morality that we need more of in our whirlwind era. It's a morality distinct from IQ and common notions of confidence or self-control. Chekhov showed that not knowing doesn't leave us without a compass, in some relativist nether land. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive.

Jamie Holmes, Nonsense: the power of not knowing

[robertogreco]

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Octavia Butler (See also “This is how I read” and “the tyranny of belief in linear time.” (via robertogreco)

[daphnecohn]

This week: Dani Shapiro on Design Matters.

Dani Shapiro is a writer: a novelist, a memoirist and, most recently author of the non-fiction book on writing: Still Writing: the perils and pleasures of a creative life. 

I write about Still Writing here. I write about Dani’s thoughts on the art of showing up and how to create a consistent, daily practice. 

In this podcast Dani talks about how writing saved her, how vulnerability made her (and made her successful), and how to know when you’ve hit upon your next creative thing.

My highlights:

@9:04 min - Here’s Dani on how writing saved her life (and the beautiful truths we get to know when we write):

I think writing saved my life again and again and again throughout my life...it gave shape to my inner world on the page. I’ve never, ever known what I’m thinking... For me, I write something and then I read it and think, “Oh that’s what I think or that’s what I’m afraid of or that’s what I understand.” 

One of my favorite quotes about writing is from Joan Didion, it was in an essay called Why I write, where she writes: “Had I had even the remotest access to my conscious mind I never would have become a writer.”

@25: 15 min - Ah... the power of honesty. People get that. And, while being honest isn’t about success it’s kind of amazing how often success follows truth.

Devotion is a spiritual memoir. When I was writing it I really felt like I might be writing something that no one would want to read because it was so idiosyncratically me. and who, other than me, would find this interesting and yet, I felt completely compelled to write it. And when it came out the opposite happened. People from every walk of life, and every background, and every religion, and in every complicated relationship with their family, the letters I got from people were so extraordinary… I started to realize that deep inside we are all so much the same,...and when I allow myself to be vulnerable, I’m allowing myself to connect. I am allowing people to connect to me.

@35:56 min - It’s so damn simple. Just write what you can “live with yourself about”:

I started that blog about five or six years ago entirely because my publisher told me I should have a blog. And I thought what can I blog about that I can live with myself about? So when I happened upon this idea about what it takes, writing about the creative process, I started doing it…. But I would get these emails daily from other writers saying “thank you."

@40:12 min - And then the big ones: “How do I know what to do next? When do I leap? What do I trust?” Here. Do this.

I think there is a diving in that has to happen before you can know. Which is one of the reasons why writing is so tortuous… What would a list be of what it takes to embark on a big creative piece of work? I had no idea what the list would be except for the last two. The penultimate one is despair. Complete and total, on the floor, in a frigging puddle of hopelessness and despair because then the final one, is just hurling oneself headlong into the abyss because what else is there to do after that despair...

Because that hurling requires truly not knowing all you can have is this feeling that I think I’ve got something to go on here, maybe I’ve something to go on here but I’ve got to dive in. only by diving will there be water underneath me, hopefully. and there’s no way of knowing until you do it.

That feeling of but I got to know, I’ve got to know it’s right before I start, and the impossibility of knowing it’s right before we start.

and that’s all folks.

[observando]