“In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God”

Great quote for writers to remember, huh? Gives us delusions of grandeur.

But there is great power in words-even in just one work. In his book Creativity, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about how just asking the question is incredibly useful. HitchHiker’s Guide taught us that. “Are you sure you’re asking the right question?” Finding a new way of looking at a problem can get you a lot closer to solving it.

And this morning I found a word I’d been looking for:
Tyranny

This is a twisted and long thread of thought. Bear with me.

Funny I didn’t think of it earlier. This is the presidential election season, after all. Kerry is busy talking about how he has a plan, and President Bush is talking about how people in the Middle East are now free and not under tyranny.

Tyranny is a nicely flexible word. It can refer to a whole country, or it can refer to just one person.

You know, my professor of classical literature told us that the original meaning for tyranny was just a King. It is a Greek word, and it was the real name for Oedipus Rex (Rex being pushed in later, because Tyrant had a bad name). I’ve written about Oedipus before, actually. This just adds to the soup of what I’ve been thinking about.

The Founding Fathers, those instigators, knew that Tyranny was a cooperative endeavor. ‘Tax our tea, will ya? I don’t THINK so…’
Over the side it goes, and those new world colonists showed they were not going to cooperate with the percieved tyranny of England’s taxes. The American Revolutionaries pulled in their powers and refused to cooperate with tyranny.

It’s kind of funny, because the things they were complaining about seem so insignificant when we take a look around at the sorts of tyranny we’ve become used to now. Too much taxes! Give me a break! How does that even get on the same page as getting stoned to death on the streets for flashing an elbow?

And yet, these things start small.

That’s the problem. They start small. Some leader, some person given the power to rule over people, makes a small move that’s not right, and people accomodate.

Cooperate.

They go along to get along. I mean really, you can’t argue over everything. What’s a little tax? What’s a little religious zealousness? It’s for the greater good.

Until it takes over. And then you have tyranny.

The founding fathers were big readers. They were into the whole enlightenment, Thomas Paine, Plato’s Republic, humanism and all that.

They came to an understanding of how politics work. They were attuned to it, so that they weren’t letting the ol’ monarch get away with anything. Nope, not even a little tax. And they thought and conversed and read and argued and came up with a GENIUS bunch of documents that were meant to protect our freedom.

And the big basis of this protection was that the power was distributed. They wanted people to be able to hold on to their power and not be compelled to cooperate with tyranny. The message was, ‘if you fall into tyranny, it’s your own fault! The keys to your freedom are in your own hands.’

And this is so much a part of who americans are, that we don’t even think about it. We have had this policy, don’t get involved in other people’s business. Other countries can hold a revolution if they want change. We did. The keys to their freedom are in their own hands.

Sometimes we get impatient, and the CIA plays dirty. They ‘assist’ the revolutionaries of a country with overthrowing a government they don’t like. But we do believe that it’s up to the people to take the reins for their own government.

That’s why we like democratic governments. Democracy for everyone!

But not everyone comes to democracy from the same angle.

Let’s go back to a more recent revolution. The Russian one, less than one hundred years ago, had a whole different philosophy. Communism, which I’ve also written about before.

The communists, of whom the US of A became terrified , had a desire for democracy and a very strong emphasis on being ‘for the people’. But they took it another way.

There were a set of smarty-pants, well-read, rich, idealistic and politically active men who started the whole thing and foisted it upon everyone else. Just like America so far.

But they really clung to the ideology. It was all about the ideology. This particular political philosophy happened after the advent of psychology. It was kind of an organized “power of positive thinking” in some ways.

Their idea was that if they could just educate the masses in the principles of this great ideology of equality and wonderfulness.

And maybe that’s where it went wrong. It got kind of messy when people tried to guide…FORCE…other people into actions for their own good.

The 20th century was a lot about that. A lot about ideological movements. There was the Russian revolution. Early in the 20th century. That happened during world war 1, which had it’s own sets of ideological movements on all sides. I have been thinking about that one a lot, too.

Then world war 2 happened. There was the National Socialist movement…Also known as the Nazis…Boy, they were a set of idealists. Scary scary. And ever after, we use them as examples of the ultimate bad dudes. But it was ideas that gave them power. All those people in the concentration camps were there because of a large cooperation of tyranny. The force of all the collective people going along to get along, going along because of the greater good was crushing.

Did the word holocaust exists before world war two? Maybe it had a meaning like Tyrant had during Oedipus’s time. No real meaning. The Nazis filled out the word like no one else.

Alright. But the Nazis burned out, basically. After world war 2, we were left with only the communists to fear. The communists, starting their political will to power in Russia…Which oozed over into places that had not been Russia…The Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Roumania. They were not Russia, but they were assimilated into the blank sweep of map known as the USSR.

And the communists were not done. There was Eastern Europe. They began licking their lips and swallowing chunks of Europe like cake. Germany, Poland, Chekoslovakia.

It was scary scary. I could go on with all kinds of examples, but history is not my forte, and I’ll probably be inaccurate.

The thing I am remembering, thinking about now is Milan Kundera. He wrote the Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I’ve talked about before.

I just recently finished another of his books, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This blows me up, just like the last one.

He’s talking about how his country was taken over by the Communists. He’s talkign about Czechoslovakia, and what people choose to remember. How political powers, whichever one was in power, would revise the history, erase people from photos and memories.

I remember another book that was about American revisionist history. I don’t know if anyone else would see it that way, but I did. It deals with America’s bugaboos, race, slavery and class status. And all the people in the story seem to remember things differently. The hero is left trying to sort out what ‘really’ happened.

What the heck happened? That’s the question Kundera was dealing with. What the heck happened to my beautiful ideas? what the heck happened to my beautiful country? When did this tyranny take over? How did we allow it?

And wasn’t Oedipus also thinking this? What the heck happened? How did this horror come to pass?

We never meant for this. And at last we get to the heart of this:

I also walk with my head in my hands. What the heck happened here?

I am trying to write a memoir. It is the story of how my life was when I was 18 and 19. It is a story of

Tyranny

Religious tyranny. It’s a story of how certain people were given power and control, and how other people cooperated. It’s a story of how I struggled to break free.

It’s also a story of how I went to Russia, landing in Yakutsk, on the same day that the Soviet Union dissolved.

So, these are two parallel stories. Me, breaking free of American religious tyranny, and Russia, breaking free of Communist Soviet tyranny.

Now that I have the word, tyranny, I feel like I can better express the story.

I understand Kundera, with his grief and his confusion, ‘What happened?’ He struggled with his country, he struggled with the fate of his country. I struggle too. I have spent my life wondering ‘What happened? How did my family, my church, come to this?’

It is not simple. It is not normal. Tyranny is not a phase of life. There were things that happened that should not have happened. And I, as a teenager, was left grasping at straws and struggling with the why.

I looked high and low for something to explain what happened. Why did my parents make the choices they did? Why did the pastor do the things he did?

How did my brother come to the conclusion that he was could no longer make his own decisions, but always had to go to the pastor for direction in everything?

What was that about?

My first word for it was “spiritual abuse” This made sense.

But it was bigger than that. I kept looking. After time I found another word:
Mind Control

More and more, the behaviors I had seen were coming into focus. And researching mind control led directly into a new field:
Cults

And that word, cult, has satisfied me for a very long time. As I thought about it, sifting through my experiences and memories, it fits.

And as I gained courage to talk more about it with others, I began to see that these methods, these patterns, were far more universal than I thought.

And eventually, I looked over to my right and saw some nasty methods and patterns coming from the man I was married to.

It’s not that uncommon, I guess. I hate to think of myself as a victim demographic, but it’s common for abuse to go on and not be identified by the person recieving it.

It’s little things. ‘He couldn’t have meant to do that.’ But nothing wins an argument like slamming your opponent against the wall. And he probably felt a lot more in control, a lot smarter when he told me that I didn’t know anything.

It wasn’t until I began to understand how spiritual abuse, mind control and cults work that I could at last recognize what was happening at home, and be empowered to leave. Boy, it was not easy, let me tell you that!

But those three words didn’t cover what was happening in my home. They call it wife beating, emotional abuse. But it was so much of a piece with all the others.

And none of those words covered what was happening in Russia, under the communists. I thought of Totalitarianism. Yeah…

And then came the taliban, who chilled my bones. That’s back to spiritual abuse and totalitarianism.

Until today, when I finally found the word, the oldest word of them all.

Tyranny. That covers all the bases. It even covers things not in my listed experiences. It doesn’t take two to do this tango. There are ways that one person can be a tyrant to themself.

We already know that tyranny requires cooperation.

I do not have many answers. I’m thrilled today, just to have a question. Here’s the question:
What does it take to resist tyranny? How do we not cooperate with the forces of evil (cue George W. here) or the forces of misguided good intentions that push us into the arms of tyranny?

I don’t know exactly how. I think that having a strong sense of right and wrong, and an attitude of mercy is the only place I know to start.

Tyranny is bad anywhere you find it. It must be resisted.

And I still don’t have full answers. But I have to keep trying.

So, I am thinking about this attitude I am seeing among the political parties. Republicans are the traditionally conservatives. Democrats are the compassionate liberals.

So they say.

I feel compassionate. I feel liberal. But why don’t I feel very much affinity for the Democrats? I feel like I should like them more than I do.

Democrats are against war, right? So am I. But I still feel there are times when it is necessary. Those times should be determined with careful consideration. I think force is justified in certain thoughtful circumstances. Yet, I am not hearing as much thought from the anti-war protestors as I need to be intellectually satisfied.

And even more than war, which is a once in a while activity, I am concerned about people who are oppressed. People who may not have had the opportunities that everyone deserves. The litany: women, minorities, etc.

And the democrats are the ones supposedly for the underdog. The party for women, the party for the minorities, that’s what they think they are.

And yet, something about it is sounding funny to me. It’s a little too canned. Political correctness is getting stale. Affirmative action, women’s rights, all those things may or may not be sincere. The question is, are they working?

This is feeling wrong to me. Is the goal truly to have an equal playing field or not? What is the exit strategy to the war on civil rights? Is there a reason why we want to have a set of underpriviledged people to help?

Okay. It’s hard for me to understand. I just don’t get it. Where I grew up…I don’t know. Maybe everyone was underpriviledged. It just felt very equal.

So here’s the thing that gets me thinking. I look around at the neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. I started thing when I wanted to become a home owner. Which areas have good schools? Which ones will keep their value?

Chris grew up in Claremont. Claremont is one of the snootiest ordinary places I have ever seen. These people have a sense of how superior they are. I didn’t get it. They talk about the surrounding areas, Laverne and San Dimas and Upland and Rancho Cucamunga and Pomona.

The voice changes. When they talk about the different cities. But it’s not just the people from Claremont. Everyone who is from LA talks about cities with different tones of voice. And the tone of voice depends on the person talking. Baldwin Park is not a scary place to a brown person. And Long Beach and Inglewood is comfortable to an African American.

But to a jewish friend, Silver Lake can be scary, depending on where you get out of the car. But then, maybe she worries too much.

I find this confusing, and I am not really sure what to thing of these different tones of voices. What are all these people talking about? Are they just being prejudiced?

I found a website talks about it. What are we really talking about, when the tone of voice changes? Bottom line is crime.

Chris grew up in Claremont. In 2002, Claremont had no homicides. Next door, the city over, San Dimas, had 0 homicides. One city over from there, Pomona, had 18 people killed.

What the hell just happened here? Why does Pomona kill people? Why does San Dimas live peacefully and Pomona not?

Chris told me that there were a lot of Hispanic gangs in Pomona. THe houses are a lot cheaper in Pomona. Pomona had 448 incidents of robberies and 805 incidents of aggravated assaults. What is going on?

I do not think that Hispanic people are more inclined to violence and killing. I think that people do the things that make sense to them.

Somehow, San Dimas and Claremont have a society where killing people does not make sense. Why does killing people make sense to the people in Pomona?

Have the police come to expect that assault and robbery and murder happen in Pomona and not in San Dimas? What the heck are the police doing over there?

And Pomona is not the worst. Long Beach had 67 homicides, and Compton had 52. What the heck are the police doing?

Why is this an accepted thing? Why does Compton kill people? Why does Pomona kill people?

I can’t tell you. I don’t know. But I do not believe it has anything to do with a person’s ethnicity. I know it has to do with what those residents believe, the story they tell themselves about what is necessary to get through life.

And what story are the liberal types telling?
“You’re going to need help. You’re pathetic.”

I reject that condescion. I don’t believe in liberality that disempowers.

You know what I think? I think that this whole thing is a lot more about economics than almost anything else. Having money is having independence, it’s having choices.

But money comes from hard work. Protestant work ethic, “he who shall not work shall not eat.”

Handing out money for disempowered people does not empower them. Getting anything for free does not make a person better on the inside. Hard work and challenges are what make people grow, you grow to meet the challenges you face.

So, I am not impressed with the flavor of compassion I am hearing from liberals. If a helping hand is required, and I do not reject the idea of a helping hand, let’s give one that allows for decency. Let’s find ways of letting people exercise their own power, their own dignity growing.

THe problem is large, but so are most that are worth solving. I can’t help thinking, what does San Dimas know that Pomona doesn’t?

Valentine’s day and President’s day are very close to one another.

Chris was saying, “I wish they had left the President’s days separate.”

“You don’t like it being so generic? You mean we should not celebrate all Presidents?”

“Well! It doesn’t seem fair that the guy who caught the flu on his inauguration day and died two weeks in office should be celebrated as much as the other presidents”

Being president is something Americans are all supposed to be able to aspire to. How many American babies are cooed over in their cribs, and hear the pronouncement, “maybe this one will grow up to be president.”

Yes, This is america, the place where you can carve your own destiny. ANYONE can grow up to be president.

I wonder how many presidents aspired to the office? If they are like most people I know, the choice of becoming president was not really their own. They may have started along a political path and just sort of pushed, bumped, promoted along until they got to the White House.

Huge life decisions are not made that way. Decisions are made before you know you’ve made them. Swerve one way or the other, and your feet have changed paths.

The decision comes later. When it comes, it is less of a “will I go?” question, and more of a “Will I stop going?” question.

I think love is the same way. The small decisions are often unseen. Will you be my valentine? How often is that question asked when the answer is not known?

I think most decisions come after the fact. The momentous changes in direction are never recognized until they are past.

Those of you, and I am so grateful for you, who read my blog on a regular basis would be aware that I haven’t written very regularly this month.

Perhaps I have been extraordinarily busy with work.

But also, at the beginning of the month, I had my piano tuned. It’s needed it for some time. I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I was feeling a vague sense of guilt that I never play it, and then I realized that I didn’t like the way it sounded, all out of tune. So, I had it tuned.

I’ve been playing it madly ever since. I pass it, on the way to get something from the kitchen, and I can’t resist playing some tricky part of a song, some trilly part that’s hard to get right.

And I’m learning to play new songs. I was getting tired of all the old ones I knew. I have been trying to learn some old irish ballads, and some old jazz songs.

Ballads are so pretty; they tear my heart out. I will often cry as I play and sing them.

But jazz is another animal entirely. They seem so simple when you hear them, and somehow, they slip away. You try to sing them, and then find you can’t remember the words. What was that again? It just slips out of your mind.

It was surprising to me to realize that most of them were just two or three very simple verses. Why is that so hard to remember?

So when I sit down to play these simple songs, I also find they are not so simple to play. I learned to play piano by teaching myself. I learned to play melodies on my own, and then I pestered other people and read things until I got an understanding of how music works. For any song, there is a structure, a musical structure. It’s like a grid that you can place down over any song, and know how you can place the parts of the song in relation to itself and in relation to music as a concept.

Jazz does not fit the grid very well.

If you read about jazz, read what they said about it at the time, the people were freaking out at how innovative and weird and NEW it was. “Jungle music” they called it, among other things. Some people couldn’t get enough of it.

Since I’ve been so fascinated with my newly tuned piano, music has been on my mind, I found my harmonica, and I was trying to play some of the same songs on it as I was walking to the bus stop.

“Danny Boy” worked pretty well, but “Pennies from Heaven” was hopeless. I realized that the harmonica does not have all the notes that a piano has. There simply was nowhere to go, nowhere to reach for the notes I needed.

And it clicked with me. That is why Jazz was so exciting to these people when it was new. They had their minds in the grid. And when the jazz musicians reached out for a note that wasn’t in the grid, it was practicially like reaching into a fourth dimension. It was blowing their minds!

I am thinking of the novel by Sinclair Lewis, Flatland. New things are so hard for us to come to terms with.

So why does the piano keep me from writing? I don’t know. My mother raised me on theories of right-brain and left-brain functions. I will say that when I play the piano, my mind does not think in words very well. I don’t know why, but even the words in songs do not interrupt the flow of concentration created by my hands on the keys of the black and whites.

I am disappointed, because I do not play as well as I used to.

But even when I was as good I used to be, I was not as good as I wanted to be. I feel a push to do more than I can, more than I even know how to do.

I am not writing as well as I wish, or as much as I wish. And I am not playing as well as I want.

I have been feeling a hunger for a sewing machine, lately. I want to make something, create something that has not been done before.

I haunt the craft shop, and I tell myself, “you can’t find the time to write, you can’t find the time to practice your piano enough, how are you going to have time to sew?”

But I can’t leave.

I feel the urge to reach out in a direction that has not been traveled before, or even discovered. And I fight myself all the time about it. I don’t know the way to start, or to find what I am looking for. What use would it be if I did? What would it matter? Who would care? How could I possibly succeed? What would good would it do if I even did?

But still I am haunting the craft stores, feeling the materials, and fantasizing about vagues shapes and colors and textures.

I like Dr. Phil. He’s not as judgemental as Dr. Laura, but they both have this get-it-done attitude. They both say, Why you do what you do may be interesting and important, but How to do what you wish you would do is way more important. So if you can skip the ‘why’ and go straight to the ‘how’, you should.

I remember Dr. Phil was giving this one woman advice, I forget about what, but he handed her what I assume to be a well-worn platitude:
You did the best that you knew how to do. When you know better, you do better. Now you know better.

I think he was right. I think the woman was trying to do the right thing.

But at the same time…
“best” is a squishy word. How do you know if you’ve done your best?

Doing your best…That would be when you stop and carefully think about something, judiciously decide on the correct course of action, and then put forth strong and consistent effort to take that course of action.

Boy, that sure would be doing your best. Gosh, i wish I did that every time I had a goal to accomplish.

But what if you did that–did your best–and you were wrong?

There are all kinds of ways that can happen.

Like, what if you did your best to keep your car in good shape. You noticed that the brakes were soft, you took it in to be checked. The mechanics looked at it, and said it was fixed. What if you drove that car, the brakes failed, and a child died in a car accident?

You did your best!
And the child remains dead.

What if
You choose to become involved in a relationship with someone, and because of what you know of that person, fall in love and get married. You tie your life and your future to that person.
What if that person had lied to you about who they were and misrepresented thier life?
You would remain tied to them.

What about this?
What if you looked at the world around you, saw suffering, injustice and poverty and decided you had to step in and help. What if you thought long and hard, and discussed with your friends, the wisest ones you could find, and read and studied books to find a solution. What if you came upon a plan to stop that suffering injustice and poverty, and you worked hard to put into place that plan. What if you were able to do it?

And then…
What if you were completely wrong? What if your cherished, well-thought-out plan did not end poverty, suffering and injustice? What if, instead, it brought on an inhumane system that was far worse than the previous situation? What if those same wise friends you talked with were persecuted, tortured, and killed? What if discussion were outlawed, and poverty increased?

And your plan, the one you worked hard for, had been the cause of this tragedy.

This is what the character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being contemplates. He is caught in the middle of the communist revolution in Czechoslovakia, as an intellectual, and he sees what was done in the name of communism.

He is shredded by what has happened in his country; and he remembers the story of Oedipus.

I hated the story of Oedipus when I first read it. He killed his father and married his mother. In a nutshell.

But the gripping drama is not in a nutshell. It doesn’t tell the story.

The story tells that Oedipus did everything he knew how to do. He really did his best. He didn’t want to kill his father; he ran away so that he wouldn’t.

but he did kill his father.

And do you remember his response? His wife and mother hung herself. Jocaste figured it out a split second before he did.

Oedipus put his eyes out.

And when I was a teenager, I was so upset by this! What else could he have done? He did the best he could! There was no way out for him, he tried his best.

But the consequences of his actions remained.

And what about the communist activists in Czechoslovakia? They were, perhaps, doing the best they could.

But the consequences remain.

Here is my story:
A married couple, tired of the middle class stifling morality and hypocrisy of suburbia go looking for sincerity and being REAL. They try the usual 60s things, talking, reading and thinking about new ideas. This path eventually takes them to becoming involved in community. They want to help build community in a church. They really join in.
They stop being around their old friends, and some family members. Those folks drink, and the church members don’t do that.
The woman gives up her feminist magazines. Church women aren’t feminists.
They dive in, work for the church even.
Then, the pastor of that church wants to move on. “God is calling me to leave the pastorate”
So a new pastor comes in. He’s dicey, because he is hyper-opinionated and has been insensitive to other people’s needs in previous situations.
But the couple wants to preserve the community. They think, we should be a loving and accepting community. Let’s work with this new pastor; we want our community to be healthy and intact.
And so they tolerate some things; it’s a transition period.
This dicey pastor moves in. He demands respect for his God-given opinion. And they aquiesce.

as time goes by, more and more toleration occurs. This man twists words, and pietizes all his actions. As time goes by, they learn to consult him in any major and many minor decisions, since he claims to have the special ordainment of God.

Their youngest child looks at them and says “Who are you? What do you really think? What is YOUR opinion?”
And her father says: “I sincerely believe what the pastor tells me.”

As time goes by, the pastor is not satisfied with his control. He decides to flex futher power. The youngest son, upon reaching adulthood, is instructed to shun his oldest brother. “Your brother is the enemy of Christ” the man says.
and the son says: “my heart is black with sin. I cannot trust my own judgement. I must always consult the pastor before I make a decision.”

The family is sick and wounded. The community is betrayed and sincerity is a word without meaning.

But the couple did the best they could.

Thomas, in Unbearable Lightness, was angry with the communist revolutionaries. He wanted them to understand that they had done something wrong.

Like Oedipus.

They were busy crying “We are innocent! In our hearts, we know we did the best we could!”

And what about the consequences? The consequences, the pain caused by their innocent best–what about them?

What about that poor dead child from the bad brake job?
What about that spouse, lied to?
What about the family, the church, the children that were part of the community?

Actions have consequences.

Bad things can come from good motives.

The greeks knew that. LONG ago. We know that still, even though it makes us profoundly uncomfortable.

“The Human Condition”

I heard a guy tell me once, and who knows? He was always spouting crap…
But he said he had done a study of lots of religions, and the difference between Christianity and the rest of them was that Christianity offered forgiveness.

Forgiveness.

Jesus said it: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

Like I said before, I don’t always do my best.

But sometimes, even when I do, even when everybody does their best, the consequences accuse.

THomas said, “You are responsible, you czech revolutionaries! This did not come out of nowhere! What intentions you had, good, bad, rose-colored from the past, these heinous consequences remain.”

What shall they, what shall we, what shall _I_ do with these consequences?

Oedipus put his eyes out.

I believe that Oedipus was a better human being than I am.

But what shall we do?

That is what haunts me, that is what made me pace up and down when I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Tomas did not want the communists to put their eyes out. He wanted acknowledgement.

Because how do you move on, unless you acknowledge where you are?

I could stand and accuse. I could point my finger. The dicey pastor taught me that.

Or maybe I learned it before.

Or maybe I was born with it.

Or maybe it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference when I learned it. Maybe it is important to move on.

To open the hand, and give a hand out to others to move on.

Like Dr. Phil, who says it doesn’t matter why, only how to get to where you need to go.

I don’t think that covering up pain has to be part of the forgiveness.

Shame, judgement, accusations–guilt or innocence–these are not relevant.

We all have tried and we have all had the best of intentions. And we have all had not so good intentions at times.

That just doesn’t matter.

What if we could make forgiveness so much a part of life, that it is a given, just the way that we get by?

Just help each other move on, keep going and keep trying to do better.

I’ve blogged before about creativity; I consider creative thought and expression to be of high value and usefulness. It is something I want to foster with my life and habits, and to encourage those I know to pursue their own creative endeavors.

I’ve described creativity very loosely, as any type of artistic expression. Drawing, Music, writing, sewing, dance—all these are easily identifiable as creative expression.

But as I thought about it, I realize that those ART categories are not the only way people are creative. I have known a lot of folks who considered their computer programs as a creative expression, and I can agree with them. Computer science, Mathematics, chemistry, and other sciences can be a framework to express creative minds.

In fact, many of these sciences rely on the creativity of their practitioners to directly improve the products and services used every day.

So, maybe creativity is not what I really mean.

If I use a pattern from Butterick, and create a poodle skirt for a Halloween costume, that is being creative. But I didn’t really create anything new.

And if I play a popular song on my piano, I haven’t really created anything new.

Not really. A little bit, I guess. Because I took an old favorite and made it my own. But I didn’t add much.

But if I sat at my piano and wrote a whole new song, that would be quite creative. That would be original.

I think that originality is the highest pursuit of creativity.

It is SO exciting to come upon an original idea. I know that one of the things I love so much about going to school was encountering new ideas. Even when they are not original, they are new to ME.

I never learned to play it cool in the classroom..I am the girl sitting in the front row that raises her hand and makes the point the teacher was just about to make before he can make it.

The teacher is droning …”And so, this leads to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which says…”

Me: “You mean everything in the universe is tending towards entropy?”

Pause

Teacher: “Why yes, thank you…”

Sometimes, I would connect the dots long before the teacher got to them. I would have figured out what he was about to teach, maybe a week in advance. I would be all excited, thinking I had understood something in a new way that no one had ever seen before.

But then we would get to that part of the chapter, and I would discover that my incredible new theory about the universe was already fully articulated by the ancient Greeks.

It sort of let the air out of the balloon. I was thinking I was brilliant and original, possibly a hidden genius for my great idea! But everyone else in the world already knew it.

What can you do?

I would often go to talk to my teachers about some idea I had, and they would always say, “Have you read this particular book? The author talks about that theory you are discussing.”

It makes me wonder if I have any original ideas at all. Apparently, all the licenses on original thought are sold.

But it also doesn’t take very much originality to go very very far. If one person comes up with a new idea, a TON of people are right there to copy it in a million different ways.

I mean, look at fashion. The fashions always seem to be regurgitations of the previous fashions from a respectful distance in the past.

Some major designer comes out with his or her expensivoso designs, based on older designs by some previous expensivoso. Then those are instantly snapped up by all the knock-off designers who make clothes for Target and Wal-Mart and K-Mart and all the other places.

There maybe have been, like, 5 grams of creativity in the entire fall clothing lines of the entire United States of America. Do you see what I mean? A little creativity goes a long way.

Also, creativity doesn’t usually happen in large amounts. I don’t know why, maybe it just doesn’t work like that. But most original ideas are simply a rearrangement of ideas already lying around.

The printing press, that boost-us-out-of-the-dark-ages device, was really thrown together out of ideas that had been used for the whole darn dark ages anyway.

But it did open people’s minds. Rearranging what has been there all along, and juxtapositioning things that had never been together before is enlightening.

Kind of like the fashion of the 70’s, which we seem to be reliving…free your mind:
Red and Pink CAN go together!
NOW ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

Baby steps, my friends…Our minds open slowly.

Very slowly. We don’t move even incrementally towards new ideas. I think it’s more like fractions of increments towards new ideas.

Some though, have minds set to be open. The really creative ones, they have their minds ajar, as it were.

That’s how I would like to be. Always open to new ideas.

At the same time, there is the fear, a real fear…At what point does the mind’s door become unhinged?

It’s well known that genius is close kin to madness.

Daily life rewards routine and patterns. Step outside of the pattern, and people will be bothered by the asymmetry.

But maybe some, maybe just enough, would be delighted.

Still busy. Here’s another old journal entry on this subject:

WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND COURAGE

So I need to understand the heroic imperative for repose.

I need to have a better understanding of the difference between wisdom and understanding.

Understanding is knowing things. Wisdom is knowing what to do with the things you know.

I can know something. Like, I can know that my best friend’s husband is cheating on her. But I need wisdom to know what to do with that knowledge.

[Editor’s note: this is a theoretical situation!]

So in life, we first have to get the understanding. We have to know what is going on, what the pieces are. We have to know how it works. Then we can take that knowledge, that understanding, and find the wisdom to use it.

The problem is, we can never have full understanding. And life goes on. We can wait for understanding, try harder to look for it, and know more and more. But the moment of wisdom passes us by. There are times when we have to act on the understanding we have. We have to go forward, make a decision, take action. DO what we need to do. But we are acting on incomplete information!
Always.
It takes wisdom to know when to make a move.

Then there are times, when action is not yet required. When the right and proper thing to do is wait for the wisdom to come. Or the wise thing to do is nothing.

In the first case, doing nothing is a form of cowardice, not facing that fact that something needs to be done. It’s a smoke screen, saying, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” Really, you need to act, to move forward on what you do understand.

But the second case takes courage too. It’s very scary to wait, when you want to take action. To pause. To see what others will do. To let God work out a situation. I have found that I want to rush in, and fix and solve, and do whatever it takes to make it happen. But there are things that are out of my control. I can’t make them happen. When I try, I beat myself senseless against a brick wall. I am frustrated, worried, upset. I work myself into a frenzy over something that I cannot control.

How absurd!

This is not the way God intended things to be.

But how do I know when I am supposed to wait, and when I am supposed to move?
It seems to me that I can’t always know. I am destined to make mistakes.
I don’t want to makes mistakes. I want to do it correctly all the time.

But the setup is such that I’m not perfect. Even if I wanted to be (and I do!), I can’t be. Not yet anyway. It takes a process to become more perfect. I don’t think I can attain it in my lifetime, but I think that every right choice I make leads to a better life for me. So I keep trying.