Life has been busy, in a good way, so here are some quick updates and links until I have time to write a more meaty post.
ADHD Diagnoses in Young Gifted Children
As a board member for SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted), I am eager to promote our new global public awareness campaign to education pediatricians and others about the complexities of ADHD diagnosis in young gifted children. Please share and read ournews releaseandlist of resources, and watch SENG’s video on The Misdiagnosis of Gifted Children:
If you have your own story to share, please feel free to do so in the comments.
New Psychology Today Post: Many Ages at Once
As part of the SENG effort, my newest post atPsychology Todayfocuses on the out-of-sync development of gifted children and the science that supports what parents and teachers have long known from personal experience: that very bright children develop on a different timetable.
“Parents often describe these children as being many ages at once. A five year old, for example, might read third-grade books, lack the small motor coordination necessary for kindergarten art projects, have lengthy conversations with adults, and struggle to communicate effectively with age peers—all at the same time. Asynchronous development becomes less of an issue as children grow up, but the challenges can last well into adolescence.“Read More
Summer in Colorado! The 10th International Dabrowski Congress
I am looking forward to attending and giving a presentation at the 10th International Dabrowski Congress, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and hosted by R. Frank Falk, Ph.D and Linda K. Silverman, Ph.D. This year’s theme is From Conflict to Peace: Globally and Personally. I hope to see some of you there.
“One cold winter’s day, a group of hedgehogs crowded together for warmth so as not to freeze to death. However, the pain from the mass of spines soon caused them to separate again, until the cold forced them back together, and thus they continued, moving from one source of discomfort to another, until they found a distance that allowed them to live but without the benefits of the full warmth of community…”Read More
“Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity such as I cannot derive from other realms.” ~ Albert Einstein
“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.” ~ John Keats
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by intense feelings, unsure how to describe them or what do to with them? Or do you feel the need for an emotional kick start to your day or life to remind you of how good it is to feel?
For anyone who strives to create, taking the time to be in the presence of art of any kind is part of our emotional education. What matters is not so much that we write an essay or blog post about a trip to an art museum or can explicate poetry or describe the history of an art movement, but that we allow ourselves to feel the intensity inherent in creativity. Sometimes that intensity mirrors and validates our own. Other times it inspires us to make room for more emotional depth and creativity within ourselves.
Let’s take a page from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and many other books about creativity, and give ourselves an Artist Date this week—an hour or two when we immerse ourselves in some kind of art experience to recharge our creative energy and restock our emotions. Cameron suggests we do this alone, but we can do it with family or friends, too, as long as we don’t get caught up in evaluating our experience or talking about it too much. The goal is simply to feel:
“The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly ‘artistic’– think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. Since art is about the play of ideas, they feed our creative work by replenishing our inner well of images and inspiration.” ~ Julia Cameron
My Artist Date this weekend is to catch the Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum before it leaves. How about you?
“We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.” ~ Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind
I am currently using A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead Books, 2006) as the main text for a college creative thinking class (thank you to my friend and colleague, Katie, for the suggestion). My challenge in this class is to capture the attention of very busy engineering students long enough to convince them that reawakening their creativity can improve not only their quality of work but, more important, their quality of life. Throughout the years, I’ve tried several other, more traditional textbooks for the course, but A Whole New Mind is, hands down, the most inspiring and effective resource I’ve found (and, as a bonus, it’s easy on the students’ pocketbooks and backpack loads!).
The book is highly useful for writers, not only because of its overall creative perspective and inspiration but also for the chapter on “Story,” which stresses the importance of a narrative sense in our new Conceptual Age. Story is one of the six ”high-touch and high-concept aptitudes” or senses that Pink says are crucial for the age in which we live:
Design
Story
Symphony
Empathy
Play
Meaning
Yesterday I shared this TED Talk by Jonathan Harris with the class, which offers a creative perspective on story-telling and, at the same time, incorporates Pink’s other five senses as well:
Once you read A Whole New Mind, you will see the six senses in play everywhere. For example, the chapter on Design offers reasons for why “improving the design of medical settings helps patients get better faster,” an idea used in this promotional campaign by a recently re-designed local hospital:
One of my favorite and, I think, most successful class assignments is to have students interview someone they know personally—friend, family member, classmate, teacher—and apply the principles of creativity we have explored in class in a written profile of their subject. When I read the students’ newfound perspectives on and appreciation of a girlfriend’s empathy or a father’s knack for story-telling, a mother’s ability to synthesize ideas or a sibling’s sense of humor, I know that the principles of the book had taken hold.
The subtitle of the book is a bit misleading, because Pink resists the black-and-white distinction between left-brainers and right-brainers and, instead, writes about L-Directed thinking and R-Directed thinking, arguing that L-Directed thinking (“sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic”) is important but “no longer sufficient.” We must now supplement L-Directed thinking with R-Directed thinking (“simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic”). The best news is that R-Directed thinking skills are ones we can learn and become better at, and the book offers many examples, techniques, and resources for further exploration.
Dan Pink’s website offers much more information about A Whole New Mind (including discussion guides for business and educators), as well as his more recent Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and the graphic novel Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, written in the style of manga. I would also encourage you to watch his TED Talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation and the delightful RSA Animate video on the same topic.
The last video I want to share here, however, is less formal. In it, Pink discusses the journey he took from being a lawyer to a political speech writer to the “dark night of the soul” that led to his doing what he does now. The quotation at the top of this post is from the interview, in response to a question about finding one’s passion:
“I find that question very daunting. What’s your passion? I find that almost paralyzing, in a way. I find it less paralyzing to say, ‘What are you interested in doing next?’”
This post is an updated version of a review first published in April 2011 on Everyday Intensity.
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” ~ Dr. Seuss
Probably because I will be putting away holiday decorations today, I woke this morning thinking of the advent calendar we had in our house when I was growing up. My mother had made it from colorful felt. The top was a green tree, and the bottom half was a calendar of numbered pockets. Every day for the four weeks leading up to Christmas my brother and I took turns reaching into the day’s pocket to remove an ornament my mother had carefully cut out, and sticking it to the tree—a bell or bird, a snowman or sugarplum or (our favorite, because whichever one of us chose it could put it at the top of the tree) a yellow star.
When all the ornaments were out of their pockets and on the tree, the next day would be Christmas. While I know that my mother must have felt rushed in her holiday preparations at times, my memory is of the long, slow, anticipatory counting of the days. One, two, three…
What is your relationship to time?
How many of you who are reading this fell asleep last night counting items on your to-do or resolution list rather than lazy sheep, and woke up not to roosters crowing or sunshine kissing your cheeks through a window or your own body’s coming to the end of a natural sleep cycle, but to an alarm?
Think about that for a moment: We awaken alarmed. From that moment forward, time calls to us from the bottom corner of our computer screen, our television cable box, our cell phones.
How did it get so late so soon?
Mad Hatter: “No wonder you’re late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow.” ~ 1951 film of Alice in Wonderland
If you feel that your watch is chronically two days slow, the answer might not be to set it fast so as to be on time, but to take the watch off occasionally and think about time differently, about what it really means apart from the ways we try to quantify it, label it, carve it into pieces.
I’m reminded of a friend who, as she was in the last stages of colon cancer a few years ago, told us that she had stopped wearing a watch and had covered up the clock in her car. “Who needs another reminder of what time it is? I know what time it is when I leave the house, and any place I’m going has a clock somewhere.”
That was one of the last conversations I had with her. Her relationship to time was changing.
When I’m feeling stressed about time, it helps me to take a moment, usually before falling asleep, to strip away, layer by layer, what is artificial about time, especially when the thought of a particular year or month or day causes anxiety.
2012. Just a number. The Chinese and Islamic and Jewish calendars give us different numbers. The month. Just a name we give to one of twelve rather arbitrary divisions of the year, each not quite a lunar cycle. The week. Seven days. Might as well be two… or ten. Then the day of the week. Monday is different from Friday only because of how we choose to group and name our diurnal experiences. Even the time of the day is only a convenience to mark the journey from sunrise to sunset.
What are we left with?
The predictable change of the seasons. The daily rhythm of light and darkness. The input of our senses. The breeze touching our face. Our heartbeat. Our breath. The eye contact we make with the person standing before us.
What is your relationship to time, and how does it affect your writing?
