A Peek Over My Radically Creative Shoulder
here’s what “owning 110% responsibility” looks like
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Listen to this audio version of A Peek Over My Radically Creative Shoulder, or read below.
A Peek Over My Radically Creative Shoulder
here’s what “owning 110% responsibility” looks like
I warned you. This week I fell off my Sunday night posting regime because this piece took a few days to marinate. And as I predicted, you’re getting a mid-week read instead of an end-of-weekend read.
Personally, I prefer sending this to you on Sunday nights. But… that is not how my organic, CreativeSelf is rolling right now.
Radical Creativity can really challenge me when it won’t submit to my logical, pre-set norms. In this case, my publication deadline. (May we, pleeease, reconsider: Lifeline anyone?)…as I was saying, my publication lifeline needed to concede to a deeper commitment. I decided that thoughtful quality was a good pivot.
So, this week I took two days off to loaf around, and I don’t mean I was messing with my sourdough.
Sidebar: Ohh, just now, as I was typing out l o a f, it took me a moment to feel the barnacles growing on this word. I realized how language dates us—in both directions: younger, older and in-between (apropos of absolutely nothing, but a perfect example of what I’m about to tell you…)
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DAY ONE
At the beginning of Day One, I was feeling anxious that nothing productive was happening: no list emails, blogs, creative offer development, personal writing, SEO crafting… nothing.
I wasn’t even calling up old friends, sadly neglected in my current work-captured days.
I was determined to stick to things with zero extrinsic value. Zero!
Then, because I know enough to distinguish between useless anxiety and useful anxiety (bowing deep to post menopause), by the middle of Day One, I found myself doing any old thing I wanted: cleaning out kitchen drawers, playing solitaire until I couldn’t stand my Queen of Spades playing hard-to-get, drawing the curtains wide open so I could stare at the unproductive, snow-speckled, fir trees in my yard, alternating between Richard Powers novel, Generosity and Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman.
Pg.6—Referring to her narrator, Faye, in a chapter on Rachel Cusk, Thurman speaks about Faye’s ability to listen to strangers and friends tell her their stories.
“As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection, they are not real to themselves.”
This hit a deep cord within me: “… in the absence of a reflection, they are not real to themselves.”
I began to ponder how much of our current social scaffolding encourages us to be unreal to ourselves. How easily we are seduced by the treadmill of productivity, with its promiscuous promise of unparalleled thriving.
I began to wonder how activating Radical Creativity might be the kind of reflection that allows us to experience being real to ourselves, as opposed to feeling inadequate, like an imposter, or unworthy.
DAY TWO
I was hitting my loafing-around stride (but, sadly, not in loafers). I was feeling such outrageous pleasure in doing nothing, or nothing of noticeable value, that I had to consciously push aside the nonsense my Productive Self was pedaling: Careful there, Ariane, … this might get addictive. Could be you’ll never pick up another productivity anvil again!
Day Three
It was all over but the hootin’ and hollerin’!
I. Was. Back.
WORKING IT OUT
From my non-productive state, productivity emerged triumphant, refreshed, as if it had a new coat of hot pink paint!
This stage of writing about Radical Creativity, ala your Inner Teen, as I wrote about in the last post—Confessions, I’m Struggling…—is layered with complexity, in large part because I have so much material gathered over several decades (never mind everything in my dissertation!), and all of it has to be in service to shaping this new paradigm I’m uncovering: the lost treasure of every adult’s Inner Teen.
In other words, there’s only so much I can pull from my illustrious predecessors. And even when I can, their material has to be shaped within a profoundly different framework from the origin of their material.
Even trying to explain this much feels fraught, as if trying—against all sanity—to gather up the sand on a vast swath of beach. And each time I think I’ve “got it!”, I look up and see endless sand stretching in front me as dry sand gives way to the vast reaches of ocean sand.
THERE’S PRECIOUS GOLD IN DOING NOTHING OF CONSEQUENCE
However, because I immersed myself in loafing around for two days, I have the mental room to dig into one, small, sand castle buried inside our previous post: The Alchemy of Radical Creativity… embracing the glory and gravity of bringing new things into the world.
I started out by rehashing my first attempt at defining Radical Creativity. Because one thing I know for certain: words are never sunk in cement. They are (thankfully) malleable and succumb easily to being altered, erased, reshaped, and endlessly re-worded.
Something in my first definition was off; I could feel it like an irritating twig caught in my boot, but I couldn’t find it in the Forest of Thought.
So I kept going, reworking the initial definition to make it a) more accessible, b) more aligned with where these posts have been and where we are going, and c) ultimately useful to you, My Dear Reader.
I pushed myself to develop an outline in a grid format, hoping the process of rearranging different puzzle pieces into the right buckets (a bucket for edges, a bucket for colors, etc.) would eventually lead to how I could unpack this updated definition for you.
I moved on to reviewing material I’d already developed, to see where it might fit. I created a 3-Part Grid, so I could move pieces around to see which information aligned with which element of the updated definition.
And, I know, this is a whole lot of work for a single definition. But since Radical Creativity is embryonic, it deserves a whole lot of careful tinkering. Besides, as it turns out, this particular, single definition is a destination spooling into multiple objectives.
Doing this grid helped me see how the Framework of Intentions—which I introduced in the What’s Next section of The Alchemy of Radical Creativity post— holds these multiple, many-layered objectives of Radical Creativity.
And that this trio of Intentions also needed refinement—a whole sand pile of refinement.
So, here’s what happened.
First I took a looooong time to explore what might be missing from my first definition, and Whoa! Nellie! Yup, that was really good idea.
Because, it turns out, I fell overboard into my ocean of sand.
In my original think-about on Radical Creativity, I did the very adult thing I’ve been raving about since Post #1:
I abandoned my Inner Teen. Forgot all about her. In the heady adult space of “thinking,” I fell, once again, under the spell of collective denial.
Yup, me, the Queen of the Inner Teen, flew right into the distressingly familiar arms of our Collective Inner-Teen Amnesia. And that, my Dear Readers, is the alarm bell I’m ringing here.
If I can do this, imagine how unwittingly easy it is for millions of adults to sail along, heedless to this potent, staggeringly critical element of The Self, Our Inner Teen, because the collective blinders are that thick!
After this essential correction, I returned to The Alchemy of Radical Creativity post and updated two sections:
1) Radical Creativity Definitions and the 2) 3-tiered Framework of Intentions.
So you don’t have to go back and re-read the entire post (I did not rerecord the audio version… my apologies), I’ll put the updates here.
Caveat: these post changes are on A Slice of Orange, A Pinch of Sky’s home page, but not on your original email—if that’s how you get notified of new posts.
The Updated Definition for Radical Creativity, which (surprise, surprise!) begins with our Inner Teen
RADICAL CREATIVITY
(n) A creative practice with intentional stewardship and your Inner Teen’s insights, which values how every creative project ripples into our aching world, affecting not just you, the creator, but all who encounter the visionary energy of your boldness
RADICAL CREATING
(v) Taking 110% responsibility, through self-awareness and self-reflection, for ownership of all areas of your creativity, including how you honor and dialogue with your Inner Teen
(v) Using accountability, vulnerability, and the native wisdom of your Inner Teen to truly see where you are in relation to where you want to be—from vision to initiation to production to intentional stewardship and next steps
(a useful mantra)
Activating Radical Creativity
with the insights of our Inner Teen
makes the soul of this truth visible to all:
to be human is to be creative.
And here’s the revamped Framework of Intentions in the What’s Next section of The Alchemy of Radical Creativity post:
[What’s Next?]
Once you activate Radical Creativity, it gives you a sustainable Framework of Intentions that comes alive in three parts.
Including the innate insights of your Inner Teen, let’s look at how this works when you …
1. Take 110% responsibility for all aspects of your creativity
2. Foster your CreativeSelf, and its natural connection to your Inner Teen, through self-awareness and self-reflection
3. Pay attention to creative stewardship, beyond the creative practice and the creation itself, to the glory and gravity it has on the world and in the world
And that, as they say, is that.
If there’s a moral morsel to peeking over my Radical Creativity shoulder, I’d say: loafing around works.
This post: What’s Next?
I’m toying with the idea of leaning into the first Tier in my Framework of Intentions: Taking 110% responsibility for all aspects of your creativity.
A reasonable place to start might be Reclaiming your Original CreativeSelf, since without a living, breathing Self, Radical Creativity remains a hollow construct trapped inside an abstract box.
Let’s start breathing some IRL into our Radical Creativity, shall we?
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