Light Inspired Liberated

I played one of those word games on Facebook where 'the first three words you see are your mantra for this month'. Light, inspired, liberated were the three words that I saw first. I do not usually play games on Facebook and I do not normally attribute any special meaning to any results from such games. But given that we are finishing up another dark pandemic year, I would like to apply these words to January 2022, and to 2022 in general, especially since the first word I saw was 'light'. I'd like to think that means something, even if only to me. The word 'mantra' itself is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning a “sacred message or text, charm, spell, counsel.” Even better. 

Light. Lys in Norwegian. I hope I can be a light in the lives of others in the coming year. Perhaps a light in their darkness. And I hope they can be lights in mine. We all experience periods of darkness, where life seems joyless, meaningless, hopeless. Sometimes we can be enveloped by that darkness because of sickness and/or death. There are many people I know who are sick; one of them, who has been declining gradually for several years now, found a light inside herself this Advent, and for the first time since she was diagnosed with her illness, took an active part in setting up Christmas decorations in her home with the help of her aide. When I spoke to her on the phone, she sounded happy. I have not experienced a darkness of the soul this year, despite the pandemic all around us, despite the sickness all around us. I am trying to focus on having hope because it seems as though it is in short supply. I am trying to 'light one candle rather than curse the darkness'. Literally. I understand the value of candlelight and soft lighting in the home during the darkest time of the year. I am comforted by the lights I see in others' windows. I try to find the joy and light of my childhood in this season. I seek out the memory bubble that allows me to live there, peacefully, remembering my parents and our childhood Christmases. It means bittersweet memories, but I treasure them. I cannot sing the Christmas hymns and songs that my mother liked without tears, but I treasure those songs and the lyrics. So much of Christmas reminds me of my mother and my father. They were guiding lights in my life, each in their own special way. Those lights remain lit in memory; they bond me to them across the vast expanse of time.  

Inspired. Inspirert in Norwegian. I find inspiration in writing. Writing inspires me to want to write more. I hope I am reasonably good at it; I don't attempt to measure my success in the traditional ways--money and fame. They don't inspire me to write. I am inspired to write by someone like Georgia O' Keefe who wrote: 

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”

I find inspiration in the writings of others--favorite authors whose words have shown me different aspects of life, who have shown me the underbelly and the beauty of life, the sadness and the joy of life, who have described life's mysteries without solving them. I am inspired by the creativity of others, be they writers, artists, actors, filmmakers, bakers, gardeners, parents--by any person who makes his or her unknown known. Creativity is the experience of bringing something into existence; anything that nurtures that is light-filled and inspirational. Creativity inspires more creativity. I remain fascinated by for example, the creativity of putting a record album together as Pink Floyd did with Dark Side of the Moon. I watched a documentary about how that album was made, and awestruck is the only word that begins to describe the feeling of watching a creativity unfold that nearly reached perfection. I would go so far as to call it a divinely-inspired album--one of my favorites. 

Liberated. Frigjort in Norwegian. Strange (but nice) that this word should be one of the three mantra words, since I was recently liberated from the standard work world when I retired at the end of August. Liberated is a perfect way to describe the feeling of being free from the expectations of an employer, and a perfect way to describe the feeling of being free from the constraints of workplaces defined by trendy buzzwords, concepts, unnecessary changes and a host of other factors that in the long run did nothing but irritate me. Retirement is liberation from one type of life and a liberation into another kind of life--one of one's choosing. The feeling of freedom is inviting after over forty years of following the wishes, plans, and strategies of others. There is nothing wrong with the latter, but at some point it's nice to be able to freely choose to follow your own wishes, dreams, ideas and plans. 

To regret or not to regret--the choice is yours

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver


I have in previous years written many posts about choice and that we choose our own lives to a greater or lesser degree. The pressure to conform to the modern life around us and to choose against our inner desires to live life more on our own terms is enormous. The pressure to be a workaholic, to prioritize work at all costs, to want all the material things money can buy, to always choose what is better than what we have now (to never be satisfied with what one has), to be constantly busy and active--all these things are driving forces that society supports and even adulates. If you do not want to be a workaholic, if you want to slow your life down, if you don't want a bigger house or a bigger car, if you want time to reflect on life, you risk being labeled as unmotivated or unambitious. And that may be the case, at least in the context of wanting those particular things. But there are some of us who do not want bigger, better, and more all of the time; some of us are content with the material blessings that we have attained/been given and want more time to reflect on life, especially now as we get older. Some of us want, and have wanted all our lives, as Mary Oliver so aptly writes, to follow the 'call to creative work', for no other reason than to follow that call. Not because it will make us rich or give us more material things, but because it gives us the chance to express ourselves in the unique way that only each of us can do. Yes, we need money to live and to function in society. But we don't need to drive ourselves to an early grave in a futile attempt to 'have bigger, better, more', because once we reach one material goal, there is always more to want, in other words, a new goal.

Each of us is unique and gifted with talents that others do not have, and others have talents that we do not have. And that is what makes the world a wondrous place to live in. We each share what is uniquely ours with others. It doesn't matter if the world judges one harshly or if one is unsuccessful at what one creates. The definition of success in our society is a bit boring, because it is always equated to how much money one can make. Georgia O'Keefe wrote “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” She understood the call to creative work and the importance of ridding our minds of terminology that keeps us prisoners of conformity--successful/unsuccessful; ambitious/lazy; efficient/ineffective. Rigid 'either/or' thinking does not help us to find a middle ground, and that is what most creative people need. It may not be possible to quit our jobs and pursue our creative leanings full-time; but a middle ground might be working at a less stressful job in order to have the time to pursue creative hobbies in our free time. Many writers and artists worked full-time at other jobs and pursued their crafts alongside their jobs. However, very few of us will reach the point where our creativity (e.g. our writing, painting, photography) can support us and/or families financially. But the middle ground allows for both. Still, we can live with the nagging feeling that we should have conformed to society's definition of success--that we should have made more money, had a fancy job title, had a bigger house, or a newer car. Some people will never be happy until they have attained (their view of) material success, but once they earn what they think is enough money, they will set themselves a new financial goal. The amount of money that equates to success will always be a moving target. It seems obvious to me that personal happiness is not based on having a specific amount of money, but this is not obvious to some people.

To choose our own path in life is to move out against an ocean that pushes us back to shore, no matter how often we try to head out onto the water, to brave the waves. You might think that the pressure to conform is greatest when one is a teenager or young adult. It probably is if you look at the statistical data, but the pressure to conform doesn't lessen when one is older. If you want to retire earlier than age sixty-seven, for example, there are people who will try to talk you out of it by telling you that you will be bored, that you will miss the workplace, or that you need the social interactions that the workplace provides. Many societal and political leaders are now pushing for people to work longer, into their seventies. That's fine for those who want to do that, but it should never become the norm. These types of people have little idea of how to live their lives without a company to define their lives for them, to give them their identities. They don't understand that the reason you might want to retire early is to have the time to pursue your creative activities after a lifetime of dedicating your time and energy to realizing the goals and visions of others. So the pressure to conform to the 'new norm' is strong; striking out against the new norm is guaranteed to get people talking about you and to you about how you will regret retiring early. Interesting that they talk about regret when it comes to retiring early, but not when it comes to not fulfilling your personal goals and dreams. I applaud one of my colleagues who retired last year to devote his free time to painting. He was honest about his desire to paint and had no desire to continue to work as a consultant for his workplace, to which he had devoted many years. He was retired from the work world and had plans to do other things that he had put on hold for many years.

Very few people are willing to talk about the regrets they may have for choosing against their creativity throughout their lives. Choosing against your creativity is as simple as having an idea that one doesn't write down or reflect upon; it is as simple as saying to oneself that this idea or vision is not worth exploring further. Or as simple as saying that I don't have the time to pursue this. But what one is really saying is that one doesn't have the will to pursue it. That is the biggest problem for most of us--the will to choose for our creativity. Because what if that idea or vision that you toss away is the only one of its kind, the one unique idea or vision that never sees the light of day because you tossed it into the waste bin? I know that I get irritated with myself when I don't write down an idea or thought that I know would make a good blog post or an interesting poem or short story. The ideas get lost forever; it's hard to remember them a day or a week later. I tell people that if you have a creative thought, write it down somewhere, and come back to develop it at a later time. It's worth it.

There are many ways to be creative and creativity is not limited to writing, painting or the arts. We are called each day to be creative where we are--at home, in the kitchen, in our sewing and hobby rooms, in our gardens, among other places. We should give ourselves a pat on the back every time we choose for creativity and against conformity. Maybe as simple as preparing a new recipe from scratch rather than buying frozen prepared food. If there are creative pursuits you wish to follow, the time is now. As I have written in many posts on this blog over the years; "If not now, when?"

'Making your unknown known'

Georgia O’Keefe wrote: ’Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing’. This quote has been running through my mind the past couple of days, for good reason. I finally understand what she means; I’ve understood her words before, but more abstractly. Now I feel the understanding and embrace it personally. Each time I publish a new book, post new photos to this blog, or create short video clips, I am making my unknown known. But I didn’t fully realize until recently that the reason I do these things has more to do with unleashing my creative energy (true success) and less to do with aiming for financial success. Just so I am not misunderstood; if my books, photos or videos can earn some money, I’d be very pleased about that. But it’s not the main reason I create them. It matters more to me that a reader of one of my books or blog posts contacts me to tell me that he or she really liked what I wrote, or that I helped him or her see a situation in a new way. I know that’s true because that has happened in my own life. There are books, albeit very few, that have changed my life for the better. Something about the way they were written, in addition to the time in my life when I read them—a coincidence that led to change. The written word has much power; that has been commented on many times before. But the same has happened to me when I have watched a good film or happened upon a very special song. Doors get unlocked in my mind, and I get to wander through them and into new rooms--wide open spaces waiting to be filled with new experiences. The creative world is a world that I simply could not live without; it is true freedom that no one can take from you. Now that I live in it, I have no desire to return to a world that wishes to shackle me. The desire to shackle may not be intentional, but whenever the unappeasable demands of others, e.g. in the workplace, supersede my own wishes, I feel shackled. Whenever someone or something wants to waste my precious time, I feel shackled. When you finally realize how precious time is, and how short life is, you don’t want to squander it on activities or people that give you nothing in return.

Socrates wrote: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. It was important to him that he got in touch with his ‘unknown’; that was his definition of being alive. I agree with him. If you never dig deeper into yourself, you’ll never know what you could create. You’ll never find your talents, and you’ll never make your unknown known. Perhaps that doesn’t bother most people. But I don’t know if I believe that. I wonder sometimes if most of us just never find the time, or make the time, to make it happen. Time passes by, and suddenly a lifetime does too. Suddenly I am reminded of Horace’s quote: ‘Carpe diem (seize the day)’. There’s no time like the present to get started…….

The new and improved, spontaneous and creative modern-day workplace

Ran into a former colleague yesterday; he left academia a few years ago and moved into industry. Not necessarily because he wanted to; more because there were no further possibilities for him to get more funding at that time, so when his contract ran out, he had no job. That’s how it works in academia. The nature of academic jobs is transient; if you don’t like this aspect of academia, it is not for you. Most non-tenured academics work contractually for three to four years at a time. But my former colleague was telling me how tough it has become to work and keep your job in the private sector as well. Not easy there either. You must like constant change, and you must adjust quickly. If not, you’ll be left in the dust and possibly without a job if you don’t keep up. There is a lot of instability there too, and you can no longer rely on finding a ‘permanent’ job. The public and private sectors seem to have discovered that the offer of a permanent job to an employee may make that employee complacent and thus non-productive over time. Of course that can happen. But does it always happen? No. What they haven’t factored into the equation is that without some sort of stability, there can be no productivity because there is no time to relax and to produce. If you are always worried about whether your job is to be eliminated or if you will lose your job because your performance is constantly being measured, you cannot produce well. That is my contention at least. My former colleague talked about quarterly performance evaluations. That must be extremely stressful. I think annual performance evaluations are enough.

I’ve talked to many different people who work in the public and private sectors, both here in Norway and in the USA. They all say the same thing—the work world has gotten much harder and tougher. Modern-day workplaces are now new and improved. If you don’t measure up, you’re gone. If you don’t produce, you’re gone. If you’re not creative, you’re gone. If you don’t like constant change, brainstorming, open office landscapes, and teamwork, you’re gone. If you’re a loner type, a non-conforming type, a quiet type, there’s not much room for you these days. You’re expected to conform, to avoid conflict but to be creative, to network, to connect, to work together in a team but to be creative, to be constantly on but to be creative and so on. I don’t know how all of this is possible. I find it difficult to draw a direct connecting line between creativity and productivity. A creative idea needs time to take root, to blossom, to grow. It cannot be pulled out by its roots before its time. It cannot be harvested before its time. This means that there is a time lag between the birth of an idea and the birth of the product that may come from that idea. What if it takes a year or two? What if it takes five years? Is that allowed these days? All I know is that scientific research cannot and does not work like this. It’s hard to measure our productivity as scientists except to look at our publication records. And even those can be misleading. You may have one good article published during the past three years in a very good journal, and that article took several years to create. Or you may have several average-quality articles published in average-quality journals that took the same amount of years to create. If management only looks at the latter, then a scientist will be considered productive. But is this the correct picture? Is it the whole picture? I think not.  

Personally, it would be pure torture for me to have to perform on cue every single time I had a meeting with other team members—to come up with creative ideas on cue, to know just the right thing to say, to have a quip ready, to have advice in spades. I don’t work that way. I don’t tick that way. Heck, there are some meetings where I can sit quietly and just listen to others talk. I leave those meetings and reflect on what’s been said and accomplished. I respect others who can and who do perform on cue; who can ad lib and brainstorm at will. I am not one of them. I never was, even as a child. I am not very spontaneous. I respectfully request that others respect that all people are not the same, and that it will be impossible to create a society of workers who all think alike.

Ideas in the darkness and in the light of day

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

— Agatha Christie

If Agatha Christie said this, then it is not so difficult for budding writers (like myself) to admit the same. I think of all the times when I’m doing housework, and ideas pop into my head, and I make a mental note to write them down before they just flit away into the vast cosmos. I wonder if there is a world somewhere—the world of lost ideas. I wonder if there is a way of entering that world, in order to retrieve some of the ideas that got away. Because they do slip away if you don’t catch them when they first appear. Many of them appear while doing mundane chores. But many of them come vividly to life in the darkness. How many times I lie awake at around 5am and ideas rush into my head, and I ponder each of them, turning them over and over in my mind. Can this work? Can I write about that? How will I develop this or that character? Should I do so? And so on. Some of the ideas don’t pass muster in the light of day. It’s odd what the early morning darkness will do for your creativity. Some of the ideas are wild, fantastical, and completely irrational—but they are exciting to think about because there is an element of dare and bravado to them; that can disappear in the waking light. My mind is somehow braver in the dark, and it is an aspect of me that I don’t understand. This can also be true for finding solutions to problems—personal or otherwise. I come up with such wonderful solutions in the dark—things I’m going to say (and mean), decisions that will be irrevocable--the new me with a tough no-nonsense attitude. I come up with quips and sarcastic retorts to rude people and can plan out my replies to those who like to talk over me when I try and speak. And then the dawn breaks and in the light of day I’m not so tough. I have to struggle to be brave and to remember my promises to myself made in the dark. And it is the same with writing. The ideas are there--hundreds of ideas. I don’t lack for ideas for what to write about. The problem is choosing the one idea I want to focus on. The ideas have probably been there for years, inside of me, waiting for an opening. Sitting down and actually writing about them releases them, expands them, solidifies them and makes them real. But in the darkness they all seem so viable. In the light, they are not. In fact, some of them can seem quite ridiculous.

I try to pay attention to my inner voice, the one that tells me what path is probably best to follow these days. My heart is in accord with this inner voice. So I have often experienced that my inner voice tells me to have several projects going at one time—I work a little on one of them during one week, and then suddenly the following week, my inner voice suggests that I focus on another project. I don’t know if it is like this for other writers. For example, I am currently working on a book of short stories and a science fiction novel, but the book that is ready to go at present is a book of reflections about workplaces and the work world that I’ve been mulling over for the last month or so. Most of the essays and reflections that make up the book were written during the past two years, but it is the actual compilation of these that took some time. How best to present them, which ones should come first--that sort of thing. It all fell into place, and once again I marvel at the creative process. I understand so little of it, but it is so exhilarating to experience. The freedom associated with it is like nothing I have ever experienced before, and once you taste that freedom, you will not trade it away for anything. 

The desire to write

The desire to write grows with writing.

— Desiderius Erasmus

There was a time in my life, a long time ago when I was in grammar school, when the mere mention of writing an essay for a class exam would strike terror in my mind and heart. The teacher would hand out those little blank blue essay books, reserved for the privilege of exam time when we would have to write out the longer answers to exam questions, or write the dreaded essay. All I remember is that my brain went blank; I froze and could not for the life of me come up with one essay idea to write about that I thought was even remotely creative. I could not write on cue, with someone standing over me or in front of the room, telling me ‘time’s up’ after one hour. Even the memory of it today makes me flinch. I remember struggling to find an idea, any idea, and wasting precious time trying to find the perfect idea. By the time I came up with an idea worthy (in my mind) of writing about, I had to rush through to get it finished on time. I am surprised that I ever did as well as I did; looking back, I’m guessing that my teachers knew that I tried hard, and that since I was good in all my other subjects, they cut me some slack.

I was no good then (or now) at performing on cue, in the same way that I am no good at coming up with snappy retorts or good arguments on cue, unless I know the person I am bantering back and forth with/discussing with and unless we have a certain level of understanding with each other. It wasn’t until I started high school that I got interested in writing for the fun of it, and that started in an English class taught by an excellent teacher, who remains a friend to this day. He loved literature and books, and it shone through. He loved teaching and he loved to tell us about what he read, or he read it to us—poetry, snippets of a short story, a newspaper article. It didn’t matter. If he was jazzed about something, he shared it with us. That’s a good teacher. He encouraged us to write, and it didn’t matter what we wrote—poetry, prose, essays, plays—all of it mattered to him. Because if we wrote, he was happy. When I re-read most of my early poetry, I cringe. But some of those early poems were good. That taught me an important lesson—the 99:1 lesson. For every 100 things you attempt creatively, 99 will not pass muster and 1 will be good to excellent. So I am happy if one of 100 poems I’ve written is good. But that shouldn’t discourage us, because that’s how the creative life is. Heck, that’s how life is in general. It’s the same way in research science, perhaps even more so. You can perform many experiments to test out many ideas, but perhaps only one or two will be worth following up and writing about. Science, like writing, requires patience and perseverance. It’s not about quitting at the first sign of trouble. It’s about not getting bowled over by the endless rejections. It’s about having a good cry when your work gets rejected or your experiments fail for the umpteenth time and then getting back up on the horse. Lately, the scientific horse has less appeal to me than the creative writing horse. But that’s just where I am these days, and it will have to do.

The early lessons in grammar and high school shaped me. I persevered in my overall studies, and ended up in science. But I continued to write, all the way through college and graduate school, my first job (that had a lot of dead time in the lab; I wrote poems on scraps of paper), all the way up to the present time. I wrote poetry—tons of it. I wrote short stories. I started several novels. I tried to publish a book of my poetry; it was rejected by a major publishing house in New York, but they actually did read the poems and picked out the ones they liked and told me why. That helped me. I didn’t get back a crass review like we risk and often get each time we send a research article to a scientific journal for review by our ‘peers’. It’s hard to hear for the umpteenth time that ‘your article is unfortunately too descriptive and would have been better if you had done the same experiments in five additional cell lines’. Your heart sinks when you read these words, because just doing the experiments you did in two or three cell lines might have taken two years. So how many years can you spend on one piece of work, making it better, making it perfect? When there is no such thing as perfection, when we know that we cannot achieve perfection on this earth? We have to draw a line somewhere, have to know where to stop. As one teacher said to me very early on ‘better is the enemy of good’. What we do can always be better. A better perspective may appear years on down the road. But we can’t go back and change what we did even when we know that the new perspective might be more correct, more fitting, or more relevant. Done is done, published is published.

The desire to write does grow with writing. It also grows with feedback. Every time someone comments on something I write—whether or not they agree with what I wrote—if they tell me it was well-written, I want to continue writing. The feeling of having touched people, having reached them, having stimulated new thoughts or feelings—that is a large part of what makes me want to continue writing. But mostly, the desire to write is innate—it’s always been there and always will be there. It just had to be set free, and it took one excellent teacher to do that for me. I can read a book or a magazine or watch a movie now, and ideas flood my brain. I start thinking—I can write about this or that. I just need to remember the idea. That is a fear—not remembering the idea or ideas, not remembering a scenario or a formulation. You need to strike while the iron is hot. Ideas fade from memory. It pays to write them down somewhere; so that your memory gets jogged the next time you read what you wrote. But just like we will never write the perfect novel or essay, we will never have a perfect thought or a perfect retrieval system for thoughts. That is another lesson about being human—we must take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, in the moment that they present themselves. If there truly is a collective unconscious and I believe there is, the pool of wisdom, mythology, thoughts and ideas that abide there will perhaps make the rounds another time and filter into our brains again. But that could take years, if it happens at all. In the meantime, it’s best to jot ideas down, and then to get started writing about them. It leads to somewhere good.

Fun on a Friday--'The Joy of Books' video

Loved loved loved this little video that's making the rounds on YouTube, about books coming to life in a bookstore after closing time. The accompanying music is a perfect match for the frolicking and fun. It's so wonderful to experience this kind of creativity. Made my day......(Friday the 13th, no less!)
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As it says in the end--"There's nothing quite like a real book". Enjoy! You can find the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SKVcQnyEIT8

and mentioned on a blog called The Scholarly Kitchen here:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/13/the-joy-of-books-a-short-inspired-film-full-of-passion/

and some information about who made the film and who did the music here:

http://keithlyons.me/2012/01/14/the-magic-of-books/