Confessions of a Serial Creative and Wisdom Advocate are two projects I’m labeling as proof-of-concept efforts. Both were designed to be realized as a series, but in production, the initial installments took some unexpected turns that had me rethinking the original ideas. Nevertheless, I think there’s some merit in them, even as examples of creative process unfolding, so here they are. To find out more about what the hell I was thinking with these two, read on!
Patterns, Structure, and Meaning
Pareidolia is the inherent tendency of human brains to find meaningful patterns in otherwise chaotic or ambiguous stimuli. Say, fairytale castles appearing in billowing clouds, a poltergeist in television static, or the face of Jesus turning up on a grilled cheese. As silly as these examples can be, knowing we can see coherence where there actually is none is a crummy reason to generically dismiss the potential for structure just because it hasn’t been immediately identified.
Skepticism, like gullibility, can run rampant if unchecked. A lot of unnoticed babies get tossed out in a cynic’s bathwater, while the sucker’s tub is packed with a swarm of kids that don’t exist in the first place. Mistakes like these are often the result of applying the wrong scale of perception to a situation or context that can only be understood from a much broader or narrower perspective.
The flexibility of human thinking is absolutely amazing—a hallmark of our great creative capacity. But when the ability to believe everything we think becomes a tendency, it’s a dangerous force to be reckoned with, leading us astray from fact in endless ways. There is a middle ground, though, and we can reach it through a generous combination of openness and relentless pragmatism.
Moving Forward by Looking Back
For the last couple of years, I’ve been on a mission.
The objective: lay all my varied efforts, exhaustion, missteps, inspiration and insight out on the exam table, connect the discernible dots, and see if some intelligible pattern reveals itself.
It’s a process that can be damned humbling, surprisingly gratifying, but always illuminating. Paying attention to what we’re doing is a certifiably good idea, but sometimes more is required—we need a recap. Then it’s time to climb into the cockpit, get some altitude, and fly a reconnaissance mission over the territory we’ve crossed to get to where we think we are.
I suspect the need for these retrospective reviews grows after crossing a certain threshold of lived experience (read: getting old). While it’s not entirely a function of age, one must have squirreled away enough pieces of life’s puzzle to qualify for a bona fide glimpse of any bigger picture unfolding, if in fact there is one. And that’s difficult, if not impossible, to do for those still suffering through the beauty and burdens of youth. Hang in there, you’ll get over it.
Age notwithstanding, most of us want to feel that we’re making progress in life, so it’s natural to seek validation that we’re on a path to somewhere, or something—say, a destination of earned understanding. It certainly beats just stumbling around in a forest you can’t see for the trees, most of which we likely planted ourselves.
The Projects
Confessions of a Serial Creative is, or could be, a direct exploration of the objective I mentioned above—a literal audit and review of the creative endeavors that, collectively, form the rope I’ve been climbing through life for as long as I can remember. It was inspired by an email I received about the Rain People album, released on Epic/CBS records in 1989. After a brief personal introduction, the body of the piece explores a bit of that musical project. But at the end, in anticipation of where I might go next, I zipped through a litany of topics that really lit me up- creative process, growth and development, an exploration of meaning, and ultimately the fundamental nature of self and experience.
I soon found myself wishing I’d focused more on those topics rather than a bunch of personal details. I don’t particularly dig talking about myself, but the nuance of experience is endlessly fascinating to me. It was this pang of desire to reorient the project away from myself and toward the more philosophical topics that wound up leading me to the next idea—Wisdom Advocate.
Searching for a Starting Point
Through many years of conversations with friends, I have often mentioned what I see as a “wisdom crisis” in the world. I’m of the opinion that our access to clear, practical advice and guidance about the nature of self and the cosmos around us is in radically short supply. Unfortunately, the internet and instant global communication have done more to proliferate ignorance and error than they have to promote critical thinking and objectivity. And as populations explode, this ratio of scarcity and its fallout are becoming increasingly dire. So I figured, why not just cut to the chase? Maybe I could drill down to the root of modern civilization’s endless issues and predicaments—find out what’s causing the wisdom crisis.
I spent some time blocking out a plan for a book. The outline came together easily enough, but sitting innocently near the beginning was the simple question, “What is wisdom?” Trying to answer that question absorbed months of writing and rewriting. Capturing the essence of wisdom in a way that’s not subject to time and place, culture and social context is no simple task.
For others, a dictionary definition here might have sufficed. But for me, those definitions fell short because they rely on other fundamentals, like knowledge and truth. Clarification of those enormous topics was looking like a pre-requisite to any meaningful exploration of the wisdom they produce, so thus began the infinite regression toward the search for a definitive “starting point”, a primary axiom for it all.
After weeks of philosophical mud wrestling, I wondered if something more improvisational might produce insight where careful consideration seemed too slow to catch what I was after. I settled on making an audio recording so I could talk my way through the topics, and maybe this more casual approach could catch the details of knowledge, truth, and wisdom in motion. Or maybe not.
With little preparation, I hit record, talked, followed where it went, which wasn’t exactly the way I expected it would go. But beggars can’t be choosers. While I didn’t discover what I hoped I might at the outset, I did learn from the process, in real time. And that’s what I’m sharing in the audio above.