Creativity

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

Jessica Olien, extracts from her article, Inside the Box - People don't actually like Creativity.

Vapor Trails ...

I’m looking up and in the sky there is the shiny glint of a jet airplane caught in the sun’s grasp, pushing silently east; I’m thinking there are four hundred people going somewhere else. I’m hoping that most of them realise the freedom of being 38,000 feet up and headed somewhere new.

Anik See, from A Taste for Adventure

I've been noticing the vapor trails jets leave behind lately.  So many planes pass over Belgium on their way to someplace else. So many.

Last night, a sliver of a moon showed up early, the sky was blue but with a rose-tint, the one that appears in the sunset hours.  I pointed my camera up from my seat here by the window and took a series of photographs. 

I think I captured something of what was out there ...

Sunset ...

The Lovin Genova Blog

Sometimes, I write a blog post and it hits a wrong note.  If it stays wrong in my mind, I delete it.  Sorry about that ...

Nice news today is that the new Lovin Genova Blog, created by the Office for the Development and Promotion of Tourism of the City of Genoa, has one of my posts up.  It's titled, From The Outside Looking In.

Davide Chelli has written a beautiful post that takes you inside the Oriental Market, on Via XX Settembre in Genova.

Home

The desire to go home, that is, a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

Rebecca Solnit

An Ideal Life ...

Lately I've been asked, more than once, what would my ideal life look like ...

I was asked to describe it today. I was quite lost.  How many people know how to answer that question?  'If it could really happen, how would your ideal life look?'  And so I stumbled and bumbled around, wanting to be nice, to be gentle ... but no, there was no nice gentleness allowed.

What would my ideal life look like?!

And it's interesting, to me, because I've quietly been working through Danielle LaPorte's book, The Fire Starter Sessions ... in lieu of having colleagues and friends wandering in and out of conversations with me.  I live an oddly isolated life here in Antwerp.  Maybe I even create some of the isolation myself, needing so much space to write and make photographs.  To think.  To read enough books.  And to maintain the family and home we have here.

Danielle almost beats me over the head with her repetitive, direct questions regarding my professional life.  Initially she set off a protective response in me ... protective, resistant perhaps. 

How much money would you like to be making?  Earned a tentative I would love to simply make some money ... became I would love to be financially independent. 

Her questions focus you down on your business, your self, and your needs.  The last question on her recent worksheet, as follows, was another invitation to dream. 

So ... what would you like to do with your life and career?  (Money is no object.  Dream.)

This morning, a similar question, different requirement.  Tell me how your ideal home life would look.  Dream.  And we're talking 'ideal', if it could be as you wish it to be.

I think I'm getting it.  We need to go in the direction of our dreams.  In fact, Henry David Thoreau tells us to Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

And as we step out, we increase the quality and satisfaction in our lives and so influence the lives of those people around us too.  We're here to live our lives and become the best we can be during that time.  To do the 'right thing', to be eaten up by guilt for not doing so, to conform to the outline of today's 'ideal citizen' ... often these things don't respect who we are.  It seems a bit like a wing-clipping to me.

So here I am, writing a book, spinning a web of planned future actions that will spark financial independence. I'm having some off-the-wall ideas that just may work.  All this simply because people are inviting/demanding that I dream my ideal worlds, both privately and in business, into reality.

I have no idea how it will go but let's see it.