Creative Rebellion Essays: Take a breath
Just breathing. Photo by JC Caldwell.
Let me tell you a secret: I’m terrible at taking my own advice. I’m usually in motion and rarely slow down. As time goes by, I feel an urgency to get things done. This has especially been aggravated by the times we are in. The way I’ve reacted to the on-going pandemic (and this week’s news that there’s already a second spike), the protests, the political divide in our country, and the early rise of fires in California, is to instinctively work harder on everything from my day job to my personal projects. Everything feels like a giant memento mori, reminding me that everything can, and often does, change in a moment.
Yesterday, I realized that I was getting a little dizzy while staring into the perpetual Zoom screen. At first, I wondered if it was fatigue or even a mild panic attack. But what I soon registered was that I was breathing very shallowly – from the top of my chest. Pretty simple observation but impactful as I sat up straight and forced myself to breathe from my core, just beneath my navel; in Japanese, this point is called the “tanden” (丹田). After shutting the laptop screen and taking a few deep breaths, I immediately felt better. For 10 minutes I did nothing but sit and count my breath, in and out.
In Zen, the first practice for meditation is to simply sit and count one’s breath.
This simple, small practice gave me a moment of respite as my reactive “monkey mind” calmed down as I halted the ding of emails, Slack, push notifications and texts. I allowed my eyes a break from Zoom.
As I sat, I stopped reacting and worrying. I found my center and afterward was able to think strategically, rather than tactically and reactively. Stopping for a moment allows the big mind to come to the fore, allowing for one to look at what’s going on around oneself from a higher altitude. And that alleviates the exhaustion and fear. If even for a few moments.
I lead a sizable design team and I’m very proud of their activism. Multiple employee resource groups (ERGs) have emerged from the team. The energy and enthusiasm and desire to make things better is powerful. And in these times, as I look at the mosaic of creative minds through the matrix of my videoconference screen, I see a lot of eagerness mixed with exhaustion but I see brilliant people with a desire to put their problem-solving skills towards making the world a better place. I’m honored and privileged to have such an incredible team working with me. But burnout is fraying at the edges of all of us. So, how to become, and remain, inspired is the challenge. I’ve been speaking with team members individually and the first thing I try to do is guide them in the process of breaking down what seems like an insurmountable mountain of work, family issues, personal challenges and societal pressures. We do this by slowing down, taking a breath and focusing on one thing at a time. Writing it all down in a list, stack-ranked by importance. Often what appears important in the moment, reveals itself to be less significant than initially thought. If we find that something isn’t going to move the work forward (professionally and personally), we take it off the list. Step by step. We focus on the Now and the mountain diminishes and becomes something scalable.
Inspire, the base word for inspiration, comes from Latin inspirare ‘breathe or blow into’ from in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe’. The word was originally used of a divine or supernatural being, in the sense ‘impart a truth or idea to someone’.
Taking a breath, in other words, is to create.
Because “inspiration” is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.
As well as the drawing in of breath; inhalation.
The breath as a vehicle for taking in truth and then the breath goes out, often in the form of language to inspire others.
It’s my experience that creativity comes from contemplation. Now is a good time for settling into the Now of things.
It’s from the state of centeredness that a state of flow can arise. And from flow comes its own inspiration and creativity.
Let’s slow down to move forward. It’s time to breathe.
John
What I’m reading:
Bento’s Sketchbook – by John Berger, the author of the wonderful Ways of Seeing, wrote about the meditative process of drawing what you see. “Bento” refers to the nickname of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a brilliant thinker who was shunned by both Jewish and Catholic authorities for his heretical views (radically oversimplifying his philosophy, he essentially thought that God and Nature were one and the same). Berger, who passed away in 2017, was at heart a poet and his writing and sketches demonstrate the sensitivity towards the Now that perhaps we can all access if we sit still and simply draw.
What I’m watching:
Tommy – the 1975 film by the brilliant, late Ken Russell. The first film I actually saw by Russell was Altered States (which blew my young mind when I saw it in theaters). Tommy is based on the 1969 eponymous concept album by The Who. It is mind-bending, to say the least. I hadn’t seen it in years and my wife and I introduced our teenage daughter to it last night. She loved it. Check it out. It’s hallucinatory and trippy on its own – I can only imagine what it must have been like for certain viewers on certain substances, watching it for the first time back in the mid-70’s,
Please visit my website to sign up for my blog/newsletter as well as downloading the first chapter from my book, The Art of Creative Rebellion.
If you like what you are reading, please order The Art of Creative Rebellion, in stores. On Audiobook and Kindle.