Welcome to Day 25 of the July Intensity Project!
31 Days Toward Living with More Intensity & Creativity
On Day Five of our Intensity Project, we discussed E. Paul Torrance and his guidelines for creative living and work. Now it is time to return to those ideas in light of what we have learned since then.
In a recent Newsweek article, “The Creativity Crisis,” Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman discuss the longitudinal study that led to Torrance’s creative “Manifesto”:
“Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.”
Torrance’s tasks measured the kinds of divergent thinking inherent in the Spork Exercise from Day Six. The Newsweek article continues:
“Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.”
We already know that learning to embrace both fact-finding and a wild imagination is part of becoming a more complex, and thus a more creative, person. Bronson and Merryman speculate on why creativity scores have fallen for children in the United States, such as spending too much time in front of the television or playing video games, or an educational system that is designed to reward only convergent thinking. Certainly complexity is harder to come by when our experiences are limited in terms of either recreation or learning.
Rather than nag our kids, we might do better to be sure to set a good example. When was the last time you visited a museum, not as a learning experience for the children, but just to see and to feel? When was the last time you budgeted enough time to spend at the library to browse stacks of books leisurely, picking up titles here and there that look interesting, breathing in the words and pages? What in your life can you trade so as to make the time for these experiences?
Kazimierz Dabrowski wrote that “access to libraries, museums, theaters, and scientific institutions” help us to develop our personality, not so much by informing our minds, but by educating our hearts:
“How many of us continue under the impression of a feeling of the greatness of creative ‘flights’ when contemplating the works of Michelangelo, how many of us experience entanglement and depth as a result of the diseased creative genius of Van Gogh, and how many of us experience ineffaceable moments when we recall reading the works of Camus or Faulkner? How deeply one is influenced by reading Gandhi’s autobiography! We recall a conversation with one of our acquaintances who told us that he often reverts in these experiences to the epigraph on the monument of A. de Musset in Paris, the words of which concern the indissoluble link of greatness with suffering: ‘Great poetry is often the product of weeping, depression, distress and even agony.’”
His prescription for experiences sounds very much like Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Dates.
Tomorrow: Dabrowski’s advice for those in the grip of creative agony.
- Do you relegate creativity to a designated “art room” or “creativity room” in your life (whether literally or figuratively), or do you make it part of your homeroom, your everyday life?
- Do you make a point to vary your aesthetic and artistic experiences?
- What Artist’s Date can you give yourself next week?
- Do you allow yourself to feel deeply, or do you habitually run from or mask intense emotions?
- How do you find or create “isolation in peaceful conditions”?
Previous July Intensity Project Posts
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Great post as usual! I let me daughter wander in the library just this morning and she had so much fun picking up books and exploring. It’s so true that we don’t make enough time for this. I’ll have to make time for this myself.
Kristi, I picked up my son from a college class today, and we spent some unhurried time in our city’s central library. I’ve found, now that he is away from home for part of the year, I have to make a point to do those things for myself, too. Thanks so much for your generous support of this intensity project.