The moon was almost full last night, and I spent most of the night finishing my book, Dreaming in Hindi, by Kathleen Russell Rich. There is a great video on Amazon, where she talks about this journey she took, after being laid off by a magazine she was working for and deciding to ditch her life in NYC for a bit to, as she says "discover who I might be in another language". This idea, that we are different versions of ourselves in other cultures, in other languages ( I am sure any of you who have lived in another country for a time have experienced this...) got me thinking about the version of ourselves that we present to the world through the language of our art...... Neurolinguistics tells us that culture is embedded in language. The book is about the effect learning a second language has on your brain, but also about her experiences within the new culture into which she catapulted herself. She taught art at a deaf school, dined with maharajas in palaces, experienced extreme danger... I enjoyed the book well enough, though there was a lot more focus on the language/learning process than I had anticipated when I picked it up, and I think I was looking for something a little less full of that kind of 'fact'......
One line in the book really stuck with me though, a quote about creativity by R. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist, talking to a reporter from TIME magazine...he says:
"In creativity research, we refer to the three B's----for the bathtub, the bed and the bus--places where ideas have famously and suddenly emerged. When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we are doing, and our context, and that can activate different areas of the brain....". So true!....
When I think about my own creative process, and 'stuck-ness', probably the most productive thing I can do when I don't know how to solve a creative dilemma is to just forget about it for a while!....
Just a reminder to keep those little moleskine journals EVERYWHERE! :)