Inspiring Creativity Part 4/5

Trust your instincts. Don't allow yourself to get discouraged. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work. Always ask "What have I learned about what doesn't work?", "Can this explain something that I didn't set out to explain?", and "What have I discovered that I didn't set out to discover?" Whenever someone tells you that they have never made a mistake, you are talking to someone who has never tried anything new.

You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive opportunity. 

Remember that genius is finding a perspective no one else has taken. If you can't find the right perspective, draw a picture of the problem, make a model, or mold a sculpture. Take a walk and look for things that metaphorically represent the problem and force connections between those things and the problem. Ask your friends and strangers how they see the problem. Ask a child. How would a ten year old solve it? Ask a grandparent. Imagine you are the problem. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

When I first read the bit about "metaphorically representing the problem" I laughed, but, I'm not gonna, that technique has come in handy. Maybe it's just an English major thing, but when you try and make connections between problems and tangible objects, you begin to see the different aspects of the issue.

My two forms of inspiration today are photography and, my personal favourite, music. Check it:

It's impossible for a water droplet shot not to look cool, especially when you add funky colours.

As for music, I'm going to go with one of my favourite CD's from 2011, Michael W. Smith's Glory. As a singer, I'm really really not a fan of Michael W. Smith (minus the classic Columbine song that had little Michael in tears. Side note: I meant me. I did always feel a bond with Michael W. Smith considering we both shared similar initials. I thought we were friends growing up). But, as a composer, M Dub is the shiz. I can sing along with every song on Freedom and I'm working my way through Glory. This album is definitely one of my favourites. Check out this song and let your imagination go; if this isn't the musical personification of adventure, I don't know what is.

Inspiring Creativity Part 3/5

There is no one right answer. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. When trying to get ideas, do not censor or evaluate them as they occur. Nothing kills creativity faster than self- censorship of ideas while generating them. Think of all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can before you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or white. It is grey. To keep the creativity flowing, never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better.

This relates back to my first blog on my creativity class: don't shut yourself down. There's a reason why "You are your own worst critic" is a cliche.

Expect the experts to be negative. The more expert and specialized a person becomes, the more their mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming what they believe to be absolute. Consequently, when confronted with new and different ideas, their focus will be on conformity. Does it conform with what I know is right? If not, experts will spend all their time showing and explaining why it can't be done and why it can't work. They will not look for ways to make it work or get it done because this might demonstrate that what they regarded as absolute is not absolute at all.

This is a good lesson for myself to remember as I head into education, especially in the English department. Whenever you hear complaining about English classes, it is that the teacher is closed off to new ideas that don't line up with their own. I pray that when I become a teacher I will have the discernment to tell which ideas are creative and deserve being pursued (and which ones are completely made-up crap).

The best source for creativity is your own experiences. This last semester was a hard one for me; the fragility of life was extremely prevalent as my family faced disease and death. In the same breath, we also experienced new life with my new (and first!) niece. It is surreal to be so aware of the interconnected circle of life and death. This is a poem that I wrote during that time.

The Chorus

You enter the world with a mouth wide-open

Your immaculate voice joins with ours

Enter in with the choir

Sing loud, O Crier

Sing of the glory and power!

You persist through the struggle of heartache and illness

Your spirit, it yearns to surrender

But you sing all the louder

You snub out its power

And shout of the greatness and splendor!

You followed the call of life ever-after

Darkness has snuffed out your light

But your pain has now lifted

Your countenance shifted

Breathe in the resplendence and might.


PS: I just have to post a pic of my new niece, because I'm just irrationally proud.

Inspiring Creativity Part 2/5

You must go through the motions of being creative. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become. If you want to become an artist and all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an artist. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.

The greatest lesson that I learnt from my creative writing class is that in order to become a good writer, you must write.

Your brain is not a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time. One day, for example, he imagined falling in love. Then he imagined meeting the woman he fell in love with two weeks after he fell in love. This led to his theory of acausality.

Yesterday I featured an art project and poetry. Today, I have two more forms of creative inspiration: dance and graffiti. One of my favourite dances from SYTYCD, from last season:

And when you're saying graffiti, you're saying Banksy. Because, you just gotta have Banksy. Because Banksy.

Inspiring Creativity Part 1/5

As mentioned in my last post, I am in an Exploring Creativity class that I'm really enjoying. I want to do some consistent posting on creativity, involving excerpts from "Creative Thinkering" by Michael Michalko, as well as some things that get me inspired creatively. From Creative Thinkering:

You are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. The reality is that believing you are not creative excuses you from trying or attempting anything new.

Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad.

This hummingbird is made from broken CDs. I go through so many blogs with sweet projects and designs, so many of which are like, man, what a sweet idea! If I put my mind to it, I totally could have pulled that off. I'm not saying I could whip out a sick CD hummingbird, but hey, it'd be worth a try.

Lately I've been reading a lot of poetry (not something I generally do, honest). Most people hate poetry because it's too figurative or pretentious. As an English major I have encountered way too many poems that make no sense and then someone explains it to you and you're like, yeah, that still makes no freakin' sense. BUT every once in a while you run into a poem that you just connect with. Below is one of my personal faves by Rudyard Kipling. (With a name like Rudyard Kipling, you'd better hope he's good.)

If

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- Rudyard Kipling

So I'm In This Class Called Exploring Creativity...

So I’m in this class called Exploring Creativity. It’s a drama class, and it’s every bit as wonderfully flaky as it sounds. And I love it.

Within seconds of the prof walking in on the first day, my friend turned to me and whispered, “So… he’s a free spirit.” Classic long, pony-tailed hair, perma-smile hippie. Classic.

So far, it seems like the class is just one big ITC. ITCs are Initiative Task Challenges and I am a huge fan of them (I did my first every mini-lecture on ITCs in my ed class). Basically they are games that emulate real-life scenarios that encourage team building, self-reflection, and are generally just great opportunities to observe and grow, if you’re open to it.

In our first class, we spent the first hour lying on our backs, “taking inventory” of our hearts. Despite the class being at 9am and me normally wanting to be dead to the world at this point, I really enjoyed being able to get focused for the day. I think every morning class needs to have at least a ten minute heart-inventory-time. I would love any teacher who did this; it would be like bringing naptime back from kindergarten. Man, I can’t wait until I’m a teacher.

As the class progressed, we moved from heart inventory to staring into each other’s eyes. We literally had to walk around the room and make eye contact with each other. At first it was just passing glances, and then it got more and more intense as time went on. We had to wander and then, when he said, “Find a partner,” we all had to team up with the person closest to us and assume Tarzan-Jane hand positioning while staring into each other’s eyes for a couple minutes. You can’t break eye contact and you’re not supposed to talk or laugh. It was weirdly intimate. THEN, to make things more intense, we had to answer three questions in our heads.

1.     What is something from your past that you want to let go?

2.     What is something that you know to be true above all else?

3.     What is your greatest secret?

You know, classic first-date material.

This time when we made eye contact we had to try and portray one of our answers to the other person using only our eyes. This all sounds ridiculous, but it was actually a really powerful experience. Some people stared right through my eyes and very intentionally blocked out any form of communication. Some people constantly giggled, an obvious defense mechanism for nerves and fear. One girl almost started crying as we stared, switching back and forth between each eye. It was the strangest feeling in the world to stare into this random girl’s eyes as she teared up and I couldn’t really do anything about it. I wanted to hug every single person that I made contact with. You want to hide from/expose everything/make out with each person, and the conflicting emotions make things really heavy, really fast.

The point was to bond us as classmates so we weren’t just strangers, and I’d say it was pretty darn effective. I genuinely felt close to people that I’d never spoken a word to. Even just walking around and making eye contact at the beginning was incredibly reassuring. I knew we were all doing it because we were being told, yet the affirmation and acceptance made me strangely joyful inside. Acknowledgement of my existence, regardless of how tiny and inconsequential, was massively encouraging. It was like, “Why yes, yes I am here! I did get out of bed today! Thank for noticing!”

Either that, or I’m just really narcissistic.

But then came my favourite part. Mr. Free Spirit got all 40 of us to stand in a circle (side note: after working with kids a lot, watching 40 people make a circle in under 10 minutes still kind of blows my mind). He got two people to stand in the middle of the circle, make eye contact, and try and portray their deepest secret. Our job on the outside was to just observe. It was like people-watching to the extreme, and the psych minor in me was giggly with excitement. Just getting to analyze and observe shamelessly without having to quickly look away when they catch you. Heaven.

Only a couple people got the chance to be in the middle, and, due to my desire to experience everything, of course I volunteered. It was unnerving knowing that 38 other people were taking in every aspect of me: my clothes, my hair, the way I was staring, the way I was walking. The prof got the two of us to walk around in a circle while staring, which was surprisingly difficult. Thankfully he let us pick our question, so I picked “what I know to be true above all else”. It was sweet to be able to just stare at this stranger while trying to let him know that he was created and designed by a God who loves him. I wanted to hug him when it was all over, but we shook hands instead because, you know, that’s what men do. Ha! It’s possible I’m getting waaay to into this class.

The class is ridiculous, but there are already a lot of practical implications that I am taking away from it. A lot of the lessons are about being self-aware, an issue that I am very cognizant of. I generally (and by generally, I mean always) err on the side of being too self-aware, and this is both a blessing and a curse.

Recently, I was really struggling with grieving properly. That sounds weird because you’d think grieving kinda just comes naturally, but it’s easy to get so caught up in your own head. I find that I berate myself for each vulnerable thought—I think about how absurd/melodramatic/unnecessary/insincere each thought is. I struggle with allowing myself to grieve when I know that there are so many other people out there who have so many worse issues than I do. Thankfully, I have a good friend who sent me a text one night that really helped:

“Be self aware. Figure out what it is that your heart is feeling. Literally just sit there and absorb that feeling. Cry. Or laugh or whatever the emotion requires of you. Don’t think about what it looks like or means or whether it is ok. Just soak it in. And when you are ready, let it go.”

Sometimes we just have to allow ourselves to feel things, regardless of how ridiculous those feelings may be. If you desire to feel them, then you are being sincere in your emotions. That sounds inspirationally vague, but it is a lesson that I need to learn. I found that this ties directly into being creative. If you shut down every idea as being ridiculous or attempt to see the impracticality of something before even letting the idea expand, then you’re only asking for failure. I’m genuinely looking forward to applying Exploring Creativity into my daily life.

The point of this blog was supposed to just be about how ridiculous this class is, but then it went and got all life application-y. Flip. Well here’s a picture of a couple chicken fans. Enjoy.

Slave Lake Revisited

It's weird to think that a year ago today a fire tore through Slave Lake and destroyed the vast majority of the town. I can't imagine what a year of regrowth this has been for the town and its residents.

One of the town's members, Andrea MacKay, contacted me a while back about using my pictures in a video she was making. She released the video publicly today so I thought I'd show it to you all.

The video won't embed, so click here to check it out!

(I represent at #25, and #56-58 at the end.)

How to Lose 6 Ounces In a Matter of Hours While Eating All the Jello You Want!!

Unpause.

This is how I feel now that I’m back in Lethbridge. At least, this is how I’m trying to feel. Recovering has never been my forte and I don’t know if I will ever come to terms with my mind being ready to do things my body can’t. Thankfully, I have a while (hopefully) before this is a real issue. In the meantime, I just have to get used to being 6 oz lighter. Why?

Well, it all began last Monday when I woke up at 4am with a stupid amount of pain in my stomach. I had been having stomach pains a couple of weeks before, so I figured it was the same thing. I went to the bathtub for solace, because that was what had worked before. Fast-forward three hours and I was still writhing in pain, cursing out every sick person I had ever encountered and swearing off eating any type of food ever again. It wasn’t until 7:30 that I had the guts to text my roommate to drive me to the hospital, which he kindly did immediately. I blame the pain for making me stupid enough to believe that that much pain was just indigestion.

In retrospect, the pain was enough that I don't remember the ride to the hospital. I can say this because upon entering my roommate’s car again a week later I noticed he had a bobblehead Jesus on his dash. When the pain is so distracting you don’t notice a bobblehead Jesus, you know it’s serious. Moving on. 

Thank God I live in Lethbridge because when we got to the hospital there was almost no one in the waiting room—I was in a hospital bed within ten minutes. Of course, just because you’re in a bed doesn’t really mean anything, as the nurses listened to me moan for the next two and half hours. At one point a nurse came in and gave me a Dixie cup full of what tasted like rotten Krispie Kream icing. I am confident that this did not have any medical purpose, she just wanted to gross me out enough to shut me up for a couple minutes. It worked. All I remember from that time was ensuring that my parents knew I was in the hospital (I’ve learnt from past experiences that they don’t like after-the-fact stories) and insisting that I have a chance to vote. The nurses were super considerate and kind enough to call in a special balloter so that I could vote from my hospital bed. I can now tell my children that I performed my civic duty while almost passing out from pain. Huzzah! (Unfortunately, they made me vote in the wrong constituency, which kind of defeated all the research I’d done on my different candidates, but hey, three cheers for democracy.)

Anyway, after a handful of blood tests, x-rays, IVs, urine samples, and ultrasounds (turns out the gel really isn’t as cold as they make it out to be in the movies!), the nurses informed me that it was probably my appendix. They told me a surgeon would be along shortly to inform me whether or not a surgery would be necessary. After another couple of hours a man walked into my curtained-off area. He had a strong limp, was walking with a cane, and looked over 60 at least. Judging by the intense look of pain in his eyes and shaking in his hands, I honestly thought he was just a lost patient. As I was about to ask if I could help him he said, “I’ll cut it out in an hour.  We’ll see you then,” and walked out.

I asked the next nurse who walked in if that was my surgeon. She answered, “Yes” with a smile and informed me that he was a bit quirky. ‘Quirky’ was her word choice. The other nurses opted for ‘old-fashioned’. I’ll let one review online speak for itself:

           

“In addition to having deplorable oral hygiene and smelling like BO, Dr. Hebert has the bedside manner of a prison executioner. Why did he become a doctor when he hates people? Maybe he should retire and give his leg a rest. I don't like seeing my doctor in pain 24/7. I would not let him touch my dog so certainly he was not going to operate on me. There are 4 other surgeons in Lethbridge I was given the option of seeing. If he were the only doctor in town, I would either die or let some **** in the park operate on me. If he is on call, run...fast, because he can't. The worst experience of my life.”

Sooo yeah. A little harsh, but still. Thankfully I didn’t read these reviews until after I was already put under. I woke up to a large pain in my side and a strong morphine trip. I found out that the typical procedure for removing an appendix is placing four holes around the organ and performing a minimally invasive laparoscopy to remove it. Good ol’ Doc H decided to make a 3-inch slice into my stomach. But it’s ok, chicks dig scars. Right?

The next two days were mostly filled with morphine trips and nurse check-ups. The incision was deep—I was able to stick my finger in it up past my first knuckle—and they kept it open for my whole stay at the hospital. I don’t know a lot about medical practice, but I’m pretty sure keeping a massive gap in your stomach open while unsterile nurses poke and prod it is generally considered… unsanitary? Primitive? Uncouth? You pick the adjective. (You can actually see the cut by clicking here. WARNING: I thought I would be sensitive to my queasy readers by posting it as a link, as it is a little gory. Note that a lot of the discolouration is a glue that they put on my stomach... I'm not normally eighteen different shades of yellow.)

But hey, I survived. My friends kept me entertained with texts like:

“Congratulations! Your children will now be part of the process toward the evolution of the appendixless man!” and

“Only you.” and

“Congrats now you have more room for food…that’s how it works, right?” and

“Be surgeried like a champ!”

For the most part the hospital wasn’t that bad, except for the whole not being able to eat solid foods thing. "Here Mr. Willems, would you like some liquid with your liquid while you drink your jello liquid and wash it down with a cool cup of liquid?" Bleh. But the nurses were incredibly kind and I was humbled by their service. Mentally I was all right, it was just the one night that got to me. My cellphone had died so I had no way to contact anyone and I couldn’t move due to, you know, The Chunk missing. They switched me from morphine to T3s and turned off the lights, leaving me in darkness to dwell on the delightful sounds of my fellow roommates’ dripping catheters and death coughs. I thought I was hallucinating when the bed started vibrating, but the nurses informed me that they had a tendency of doing that. So I spent the next 7 hours counting down the minutes till morning with the help of my ticking IV, drooping in and out of a drug trip that resulted in an angsty, paranoid poem scribbled in a colouring book that was reminiscent of my brooding, teenage days. Here’s just a small taste:

I'm entombed in collapsible curtains and faint glowing lights

Warning me that I’ve barely begun the night

I swear death echoes in his phlegm-filled cough

He has to make it through the night for all these guilty thoughts

Raindrops and dripping catheters

His grotesque shadow envelopes hers

Riding the vibrating IV wires on undulating waves

Naked and exposed, I avoid his lifeless gaze

Nothing but chicken broth and mucus on my fingers and teeth

Come on T3s, relieve!

So there’s that. Honestly for being high and half-unconscious, I’m pretty proud of it. Maybe I need to return to my dark, brooding days in order to find true inspiration.

Thankfully, my stay was over the next day and the nurse prepared me to go. She ripped the medical tape off of my stomach and promptly commented that I must be allergic to medical tape due to the splotchy redness that appeared. My response was a polite smile, but in my head I was thinking, I’M NOT ALLERGIC TO TAPE, I’M ALLERGIC TO YOU RIPPING OFF ALL MY STOMACH HAIR!! Funny side story about my stomach hair (yup, I just said that), but after my last surgery, the heart monitors on my chest had done similar damage, leaving my stomach looking like a lawn mowed by a hiccuping rabbit. I had to shave my chest in order to get it back to normal and it was only a couple of weeks ago that it had re-grown to its typical, lustrous length. (I know what you’re picturing here, but I promise you, I have a very normal amount of chest hair. You can stop grimacing.) So thanks to this appendectomy, my chest has returned to its sporadic, interspersed state and I am forced to wear a shirt all summer until I can even things out again. Sigh.

There, now you all know waay too much about my body hair.

After getting released from the hospital, my delightful mother drove me back to Calgary where she took care of me while I sat around doing a whole lot of nothing for a week. Like I said, I’m a fairly sucky recover-er and it was frustrating just sitting around. I sat and watched status after status of people announcing “I’m DONE!”, getting upset that my final exams are still looming over me. Thankfully, my school was really good about getting everything deferred, so I have another couple of weeks before I really have to worry about it. This is both really good, as I am not in the mental state to write an exam, and really bad, as I now have another month to wait for something that I just want to get over with. Oh well. Work has also been very accommodating, which I am super appreciative of. I had almost convinced myself that I was ready to return to it, until I tried going out with friends and found myself sleeping. All day. I fell asleep on my floor four separate times that day. The next day I went to “walk around” the mall for an hour and ended up falling asleep in a chair in Chapters. So, I’m not better yet, but at least I’ve got a keyboard and, thanks to my mom, a month’s supply of tuna casserole. I would give up every futile organ in my body for a month’s supply of tuna casserole.  

This morning my mom dropped me off back in Lethbridge. We hugged goodbye and she said, “Well, it’s been a slice. Hah! Literally.”

Good one, mom.

(A sincere thanks to those who texted me and visited me in the hospital; it meant a lot. And a special thanks to my roommate Kyle who not only drove me to the hospital, but washed my sheets and cleaned my room so that my mom could spend the night there. And thanks to my mom, for being my mom. And God, for letting my appendix burst in Lethbridge, and not in Peru. Though, we’re going to have to have talk about why the heck I have(/had) a useless appendix in the first place, but we’ll work on that.)

Update: Here is a current shot of what it looks like a week after the surgery. This pic is substantially less gross, but I'll still put the gory disclaimer on it.

I just got back from my follow up appointment with my surgeon. After my roommate kindly drove me across town, I waited for a while until the doctor called me in and sat me down.

"You got a fever?"

"Nope."

"Diarrhea?"

"Nope."

"You're good."

And that was it. I asked him if he wanted to see the scar and he obliged for half a second before muttering "fine" and rushing me out the door. You stay classy, Doctor Hebert. Yikes.