By far, my most creative period was my first two years of college. Relocating from the suburbs of Westchester, NY to Northwestern’s Midwest campus was the first of many new adjustments I had to make during this time period. Going down the checklist of creativity-inducing activities in “How to be Creative” I did just about everything.
Academically, my schedule each quarter would range from Statistics to “Asian Americans in the Media” to Intro to Social Policy to “The Life and Music of Miles Davis.” I drifted from the School of Arts and Science, to the Communications School (thinking I would major in drama), to finally the School of Education in Social Policy where I majored in Social Policy. Each day I would call my dad, who was a really important figure in my creative process, as someone who I could practice articulating the concepts that I had absorbed and someone who maintained my level of enthusiasm for participating in the exciting world of ideas.
Socially I was all over the map as well. In high school, my social circle consisted mainly of a group of theatre loving, academically competitive, straight-laced fun kind of girls, whom I had known since Kindergarten. It was a bit of a shock when Freshman year of college, I was paired with a brilliant liberal pot-smoking politico from San Francisco. Perhaps in reaction to this pairing, I sought to balance out the “goodie-goodie” role that I played in her presence by being the “rebel” Jewish girl who church hopped with various members of the Christian Fellowship on campus. Each day I set up lunches with different groups –sometimes they were just unified by circumstance or dormhall, while other times they had a common link such as engineering, a sorority, swimming, ROTC, community service etc.
While I wasn’t necessarily drinking a lot I was relaxing (sleeping up to 10 hours a day) and had little imposed structure to my day. This was also in stark contrast to my overscheduled high school career where I was juggling theatre, AP classes, debate, voice lessons, etc and had little free time. Since I didn’t immediately latch onto one group or person, I spent a lot of time alone, lost in my own thoughts and neuroses. I remember describing to my mom that I was looking at the world as if I were in a fish bowl –aware but separated from everything that was going on around me.
In another article Jonah Lehrer wrote about creativity “Groupthink: the Brainstorming Myth” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=1), he notes that “human creativity has increasingly become a group process…many of us think better when we are teamed up.” He refutes the image of the “lone genius” and points to the fact that the best papers, musicals and social solutions are generated in groups –ideally among those “with an intermediate level of social intimacy.” Intimate spaces, he argues, are critical for inducing chance encounters with diverse agents. He also discusses how the act of negating others ideas spurs the creative process “allowing people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable.”
The basic thesis of this article reinforced why my college experience was such a creative time period –I essentially spent my time in a variety of spaces (dorm gathering space, lunch table, classroom, laundry room etc) that allowed for “frequent, physical, spontaneous, interactions” with people whose ideas and backgrounds were antithetical to mine. While my initial impulse was to reject the lifestyles and value choices that were different than mine, the dissonance forced my brain to think deeper about these subjects than I ever had before. However, while the article discusses the importance of interaction in the creative process, it is presented as an antidote to information overload. The article does not touch on why people are driven to work together and interact, which I believe is due to the genuine need among humans to connect and feel a part of something.
During college I was exploring academically and socially not for the sake of expanding my creative capacities –I was looking for a “home.” I wanted a best friend, major, a sorority, a religion, a boyfriend, a dorm hall where I felt I truly fit. I wanted to replicate the consistency of my high school social circle and impose the structure I had in high school on my daily schedule. Drifting was incredibly unsettling and emotionally exhausting –I constantly felt I was performing and few people knew me. When I finally found a small group where I felt I fit in, I dropped a lot of the linkages that I had formed my first two years. I committed to my major of Social Policy and began to abandon the zeal with which I had attacked my courses in previous semesters.
All this is to say that committing to this state of an “intermediate” level of social intimacy with people and constantly exposing oneself to different metaphors and worlds of ideas can be very lonely and exhausting. I think we have an inherent craving for depth in relationships and depth in knowledge (an expertise) that perhaps works to undermine our creative capacities. While I would like to reject the kind of life stability that breeds boredom and thwarts creativity, it seems that all of the life stages ahead of me mandate physical, emotional and interpersonal stability. This led me to think that maybe the picture of the “lone genius” is still alive –while this person may engage in social behaviors for the purposes of accomplishing tasks and spurring creativity, perhaps it is the lack of genuine connection to others is what makes her so great.
excellentefilante 