What On Earth Is It Taking Me So Gosh Darn Long?
or, two rabbit holes walked into a bar...
One ordered the Procrastination Elixir. The other ordered the Intuitive-Timing martini.
This post has taken me the longest yet to put before you, my dearest readers—four weeks. 30 days. 720 hours. 42,300 minutes. 2,538,000 seconds… a lifetime in the digital space.
With each publication, I’ve been aiming the quiver of one, pivotal question into the heart of these posts:
What is the most compelling way to wake up our collective consciousness to the forgotten link between the inner child and adulthood—our exiled, Inner Teen?
And it comes down to language.
What words, phrases, or combinations of words and phrases, will strike the hearts and minds of most people?
In an effort to climb out of my own bubble, I reached out to a precious friend, who is also pretty savvy, and asked for an assessment of my tagline.
When he suggested that “radical” had been popularized (in certain circles) as in “radical authenticity” (whatever that means), I was first appalled, then dismayed, and then just pissed off that radical might have become ubiquitous in the same way that “awesome” and “amazing” (two marvelous adjectives that carry a lot of contextual weight) have become a popular go-to for anyone too lazy to even imagine we have 4,798 other adjectives in the English language.
In Week Two, I was about two-thirds of the way through this allegedly “next” post when the radical axe landed.
Theoretically, I could have shoved this unnerving revelation into a corner and kept writing.
Instead, I began fiddling with my tagline under the naïve assumption that, even though I’ve already started laying down the field markers for What Is Radical Creativity?, I could find a sassy replacement.
And that’s when the rabbit holes took over.
Every Week, For The Past 4 Weeks, I Started Writing your Next, Weekly Post
“How Alive Is Your Inner Teen, Really? Inner Teen Gift #4”
And I would make progress, I really would.
But I also started going down some relevant rabbit holes trying to find an alternative to “radical.”
As often happens in the English language—arguable one of the most flexible and ever-evolving languages—nothing quite matches the feeling-tone of radical.
Revolutionary reeks of authority and cannons firing and lots of radicals running around.
Innovative, transformative, and profound feel as if these are discreet elements inherent in “radical,” but not wholly radical.
Each time, I turn back to writing the next, logical sequence I’d set up for the Inner Teen Gifts, I would feel unsettled, a disconcerting stomach-drop signaling trouble ahead.
At first, I thought my internal compass was jumpy about heading into the unknown territory of Radical Creativity. Because, at the core of every new paradigm lives a dirty, little secret: how much thinking about it actually happens on the fly, as I’m writing about it.
As best as I can trace this back, Radical Creativity began as an undefined, intuitive presence flowing around my current understanding of creativity like an early morning fog. As I became intentionally curious about this amorphous presence, I noticed that when I wrote or spoke about creativity or creative behavior, I could sense a metaphorical tapping on my shoulder, as if this presence was craving more form, more definition.
And here’s where the questions became perky and pesky.
What if Radical Creativity is more than an idea, more than an intellectual paradigm?
What if Radical Creativity is an existentially defined form, something waiting for embodiment with and through human expression?
But, I’m racing ahead.
Back to the point
I have been dismayed with each Sunday sliding by, with yet another unfinished post, convinced I’d slid down another rabbit hole and downed the Procrastination Elixir.
It took three weeks before my CreativeSelf took me by the hand and walked me to a lookout point where the ever-expanding landscape of A Slice of Orange, A Pinch of Sky stretched out before us.
Shimmering Far Off On the Horizon
When I saw Radical Creativity’s fluid foothills beneath the peaks of our Inner Teen, I was awed by the sheer range of what can emerge from The Unknown.
As a writer/educator, I had set up all manner of “necessary” writing structures for these posts: outlines, topics, subtopics, logical progressions from one idea to the next, all with a naive disregard for how A Slice of Orange, A Pinch of Sky was quietly, persistently shaping my creative journey more than I was shaping it.
In an effort to honor the popular, online demand for consistency , I failed to honor the unfolding of my own Radical Creativity inside the creative core of this publication.
And, I could have gone on like this, for god knows how many posts, allowing the familiarity of consistency to smother the discomfort in my stomach.
Radical Creativity Schools The Radical Creator
Here’s what I stumbled into while wandering those Radical Creativity foothills tonight:
Like birth and death, Radical Creativity commands its own timeframe in the creative realm.
Whereas our typical creative behavior might be squeezed into and around our personal lifestyle, Radical Creativity reorganizes time in response to the heartbeat of the project at hand.
During Radical Creativity Time, our normal clock-time turns into a compass for paying attention—without expectation or judgment—while navigating our informed, intentional choices for creative expression.
During Radical Creativity Time, our main responsibility (the ability to respond) asks us to deeply listen, respect, and take action on the wisdom nudges from our CreativeSelf—which might be in opposition to what we think should be happening. Or where we think we should be. Or what we think we should be doing.
With this realization, I’m learning to school myself on feeling when to lean in and when to wait.
After Waiting Four Weeks, Here’s Where I’m Leaning In
I begin with an apology, dear reader, for failing to explain that these posts, as coherent as they might appear, are actually a raw experiment—the first draft of a book that has been chocking on the dust of neglect for years.
As much as writing is a solitary act, without you, my first draft of this book—A Slice of Orange, A Pinch of Sky—might remain a solitary shelf-act.
As much as this four-week-wait for a post might seem as if I am neglecting you—and something I feared you might feel—after downing the Intuitive Timing martini in the Rabbit Hole Tavern, here’s a glimmer of what I can offer.
It’s out of logical-post sequence, yes. But in the heart of Radical Creativity Timing.
Radical Creativity Element #1: RC invents its own timeframe that reshapes our everyday, intuitive creativity into the transcendent, radical, creativity-as-intentional-present-awareness that my doctoral-research teenagers intuited in previous posts.
Once I understood this, I realized that before I go any further uncovering more elements of Radical Creativity, I needed a good-enough-for-now definition, because…
Definition is Destination
In my online world of visual artists, where I hold forth on the useful power of artist statements, I discovered that the greatest impediment to writing one was a vague, hodgepodge idea of a definition. No one really knew what an artist statement was because no one had bothered to do the work of defining it.
If you don’t know what something is, you can’t find it. A name without a definition is like a destination without coordinates.
So, taking my own advice, I took some time to clean up my coordinates for what we are doing here with both the Inner Teen and Radical Creativity.
If you’re up of it, when I wandered out of those Radical Creativity foothills, here’s what I was carrying... Why Do We Throw Teens in the Trash?
And, that, my Dear Readers, is what has taken me so gosh darn long!
What’s Next?
We’ll head back into Inner Teen Gifts with How Alive Is Your Inner Teen, Really? Inner Teen Gift #4 where presence is prescience. And your Radical Creativity impatiently taps its fingers.
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