Monday, January 6, 2014

FBstatus Nov 10 2013: why creative people are "different"

(This was really weird to read -- because having these things described as 'foreign' to 'normal humans' was diosconcerting.  Kinda' like my ongoing irritation with people who consider me capable of hyper-focus: I am reasonably convinced that all humans can focus adequately, but that many of us get broken while we are developing and then can't ... which makes those of us who can look 'weird' or 'specially capable' ... when really, I am just healthy in some places most Americans (at least) don't seem to be nowadays [and broken in different ones, that display differently].  What I actually said on Fb was this:)

Oh.
This explains (by derivation) why other people act (and don't act) the way they do. Huh. An interesting mirror on 'normal' ...

Thanks, Irene :).


http://www.matthewschuler.co/why-creative-people-sometimes-make-no-sense/

Comments: 

Me:  What is most funny to me, the longer I sit with this, is how I don't experience the distinctions, and certainly not the 'opposites'-ness, of these terms as the author implies humans "do"(/so firmly "should" in their head that they cannot make the distinction between their prejudice and a more variable reality). 

As a person with a massive and exquisitely (painfully, most would say ) precise vocabulary, I recognize the rhetorical 'correctness' of the conceptual assertions, and the derivative assertions of opposite-ness. But the dictionary meanings have so little to do with how these attributes actually manifest in actual thought-life, psychological-life, emotional-life ... I rarely experience any sense (as it's implied most people do?) of conflict between the impetuses listed. They are all ways of looking at problems, they each add their own true-being, colors, forms, rhythms* to the eventual answers. 

Perhaps what is upsetting to others is the dynamic nature of the multi-dimensional balance/center that I (and apparently other "creative" people) maintain? It is true that pieces are always in motion -- that motion is a fundamental, and something that therefore must necessarily be perceived as beautiful and life-giving -- in my personal development and in my perception of what is required for local/global/universal development. Preferentially static thinkers and people who prefer or need intellectual stability or security don't prefer to hang out with me, for sure ...  

I have always been of the opinion that creativity -- even deep creativity -- is inherent to human nature, but that many of us are so injured we cannot access it. Certainly for many years I was.
 

Thoughts? 


Me:  * my attempt to explore thought-life in 1D, 2D, 3D, and 4D

CH:   Csikszentmihalyi is awesome! I am a huge fan of his thinking around human behavior....

Me:   [CH]: well, I'll have to read more of him, then. Any particularly recommended books/articles (with the caveat that I don't have access to an academic library, only the Portland library system, for the nonce)?

CH:  If you message me a viable email account, I can email you articles. I am reading Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow" right now, and I found it in Barnes and Noble...

Me:  on it

KJ:  (As with everything, I find...)It is a matter of perspective. I think that artists (and scientists and philosophers) are granted this magical power of holding two seemingly contradictory aspects in conceptual agreement. It could be said to be a fundamental flexibility of those disciplines, but I too believe all people can and should exercise this capacity. Call it creativity, imagination, what have you; it is an function of any working brain/body.

KJ:  That said, some brains -i.e. those of "creative types"- are more adept, by way of practice and some might say obsessional fixation, at this way of perceiving and functioning, that it may affect a zone of discomfiture with those other people unused to splashing about in the shifting miasma of chemical contradictions we call consciousness.

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