Creativity (49 page)

Shifting from one of these poles to the other is important also in
relationships—between friends, spouses, or parents and children. For a relationship to work, it is essential to listen to the other person, to try to imagine why she says what she says, what she feels, how she sees the world. It is essential to change perspectives when necessary, to compromise, to understand the world and to act differently, because this is what the other person’s reality requires. Yet it is just as important to remain in touch with our own beliefs and perspectives. In a relationship we should be able to shift moment by moment from our own viewpoint to that of the other. We
can see depth only because looking with two eyes gives us slightly different perspectives. How much deeper can we see when instead of two eyes we rely on four! This dual vision again doubles the riches of the world we experience and makes it possible to react creatively to it.

Aim for complexity
. The ability to move from one trait to its opposite is part of the more general condition of psychic complexity. Complexity is a feature of every system, from the simplest amoeba to the most sophisticated human culture. When we say that something is complex we mean that it is a very differentiated system—it has many distinctive parts—and also that it is a very integrated system—the several parts work together smoothly. A system that is differentiated but not integrated is complicated but not complex—it will be chaotic and confusing. A system that is integrated b
ut not differentiated is rigid and redundant but not complex. Evolution appears to favor organisms that are complex; that is, differentiated and integrated at the same time.

Complexity also is a feature of human personality. Some people are integrated but not very differentiated: They hold on to a few ideas, opinions, or feelings. They are predictable. They come across as boring, one-dimensional, rigid. There are others who express many opinions, who are changeable and constantly striving to accomplish something new and different, but who give the impression that they have no center, no continuity, no ruling passion. They have a differentiated consciousness that is not well integrated. Neither of these ways of being is very satisfying.

As we have seen, creative individuals seem to have relatively complex personalities. Neither the centrifugal nor the centripetal force prevails—they are able to keep in balance the contrary tendencies that make some people turn inward until each becomes a hard shell,
and others fly outward at random. A creative person is highly individualized. She follows her own star and creates her own career. At the same time, she is deeply steeped in the traditions of the culture; she learns and respects the rules of the domain and is responsive to the opinions of the field—as long as those opinions do not conflict with personal experience. Complexity is the result of the fruitful interaction between these two opposing tendencies.

But psychological complexity is not just a luxury reserved for creative individuals. Every person who wants to realize fully the potentiality of what it is to be human, and who wants to take part in the evolution of consciousness, can aim for a more complex personality. To do so we need to explore and strengthen those traits that are now lacking, to learn to shift from openness to discipline, within a context of curiosity and awe for the miracle of life. The notion of complexity adds a deeper layer of understanding of why it is important to achieve this. By fully expressing the ten
dencies of which we are capable, we become part of the energy that creates the future.

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Up to now I have said nothing about the role of thinking in personal creativity. The reason is that if motivations, habits, and personality traits are in place, most of the job is done. It is inevitable that one’s creative energies will start to flow more freely. Nevertheless, it is also useful to consider what kind of mental operations expedite novel solutions to problems in the domain of daily life.

Problem Finding

Creative people are constantly surprised. They don’t assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don’t assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious—not out of contrariness but because they see the shortcomings of accepted explanations before the rest of us do. They sense problems before they are generally perceived and are able to define what they are.

The reason we consider the artists of the Renaissance so creative is that they were able to express the emancipation of the human spirit from the shackles of religious tradition before the humanist scholars or anyone else did. The use of perspective in painting broke down the flat hierarchical order of Byzantine composition. The introduc
tion of expression, movement, and everyday subject matter into pictorial art lifted human experience to the level of importance previously occupied by static representations of religious ideas. Without expressly intending to, without a clear understanding of the consequences of their actions, the Renaissance artists changed our perspective on the world.

The creativity of artists in this century also consisted in formulating a new visual perspective on the human condition, albeit a much more pessimistic one this time. The experiments with cubism, abstraction, and expressionism in the visual arts, in music, and in literature were precursors of relativism in the social sciences and deconstructionism in philosophy. They expressed in visible form the problems of our age: The lack of a common set of values, the suspicion of ultimate beliefs, the loss of faith in progress brought about by two world wars and their horrors—these were
prefigured in the distorted, anguished, and random representations that populate modern art.

If you learn to be creative in everyday life you may not change how future generations will see the world, but you will change the way
you
experience it. Problem finding is important in the daily domain because it helps us focus on issues that will affect our experiences but otherwise may go unnoticed. To practice this skill you might try the following suggestions.

Find a way to express what moves you
. Creative problems generally emerge from areas of life that are personally important. We have seen that many individuals who later changed a domain were orphaned as children. The loss of a parent has a huge impact on a young person’s life. But what, exactly, is this impact? Does the sadness include a feeling of relief? Of heightened responsibility? Of freedom? Of increased closeness to the surviving parent? Unless one finds words, ideas, or perhaps visual and musical analogies to represent the impact of the loss on one’s experience, it is likely th
at the parent’s death will cause violent pain at first, a generalized depression later, and with time its effects will disappear or work themselves out unconsciously, outside the range of rational control.

Other problematic issues in early life include poverty, illness, abuse, loneliness, marginality, and parental neglect. Later in life the main reasons for unease may involve your job, your spouse, or the
state of the community or of the planet. Lesser concerns may derive from a temporary threat: the scowl of a boss, the illness of a child, the change in the value of your stock portfolio. Each of these is likely to interfere with the quality of life. But you will not know what ails you unless you can attach a name to it. The first step in solving a problem is to find it, to formulate the vague unease into a concrete problem amenable to solution.

Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible
. When you know that you have a problem, consider it from many different perspectives. How you define a problem usually carries with it an explanation of what caused it. Our first impulse is to label problems by relying on tried-and-true prejudices. If we have a disagreement with our spouse we immediately assume that we are innocent and the fault is with the other party. This may be true some of the time but certainly not always. The most realistic assumption is that both parties are at fault, and the question is to understand what motivate
d each partner to take his or her position in the argument.

Also, although the argument may be ostensibly about one thing, for instance, money, don’t assume that appearances are true. The disagreement really may be about financial decision making and hence about power; or it might be about lack of respect or about inequality in the amount of psychic energy invested in the relationship. How you identify the nature of the problem is critical for the kind of solution that will eventually work.

Creative individuals do not rush to define the nature of problems; they look at the situation from various angles first and leave the formulation undetermined for a long time. They consider different causes and reasons. They test their hunches about what really is going on, first in their own mind and then in reality. They try tentative solutions and check their success—and they are open to reformulating the problem if the evidence suggests they started out on the wrong path.

A good way to learn problem finding in everyday life is to stop yourself when you sense you have a problem and give it the best shot at a formulation. If someone has been promoted ahead of you, you might define the problem as “This happened because the boss dislikes me.” As soon as you do this,
reverse the formulation
: “It happened because I dislike the boss.” Does this way of looking at the problem
make sense? Could it be at least partly true? And then immediately consider a few more alternatives: “It happened because I haven’t kept up with the changing job as much as I should have” or “Lately I have been too distraught by what happens at home, and it affected my performance.” Which formulation comes closest to representing the problem? Perhaps each is true to a certain extent, and your colleague’s promotion was overdetermined by several unrelated causes.

It is possible that you eventually decide that the fact that you didn’t get promoted is no problem at all. Being passed over may give you more time to spend at home, to learn something new, to devote your psychic energy to some other task. You may come to realize that the problem was your competitiveness, your ambition, the fact that you invested all your energies in advancing on the job rather than doing a good job for its own sake, or living more fully. So the failed promotion, instead of being the problem, is really the first step to the solution of a more fundamental problem.

Perhaps none of these formulations is “right” in the sense that it identifies correctly the causes of the event. Nevertheless, it is extremely important to identify the nature of the problem, because what you will do next depends on it. By naming the problem and attributing a cause to it you will shape not only the past but, more important, the future. It is in this sense that the lives of creative individuals are less determined than most of our lives. Because they pause to consider a greater range of possible explanations for what happens to them, they have a wider and less predictable range
of options to choose from.

Figure out the implications of the problem
. Once you have created a formulation, you can begin to entertain possible solutions. Of course, solutions even to a simple problem like “Joe was promoted ahead of me” vary incredibly depending on how you formulated it and therefore what causes you attributed to it. Solutions might include finding interests outside the job, or learning to understand and to like the boss, or catching up on job skills—or a little of each.

At this stage, too, it pays to consider a variety of solutions, to entertain different possibilities. Creative individuals experiment with a number of alternative solutions until they are certain that they have found the one that will work best. Again, as soon as you think of a
good solution, it is useful to think of an opposite one. Even the most experienced person is often unable to tell in advance, just by thinking, which solution will do the trick. So first trying one way of going about the problem, then trying another tack for a while, and then comparing results often yields the most creative result. It is good to be quick and consistent. But if you wish to be creative you should be willing to run the risk of sometimes seeming indecisive.

Implement the solution
. Solving problems creatively involves continuous experimentation and revision. The longer you can keep options open, the more likely it is that the solution will be original and appropriate. Artists who do more original work change their technique as they are painting, and their paintings develop on the canvas in less predictable ways than those of less original artists. This is because the original artist is more ready to learn from the emerging work; he or she is alert to the unexpected and is willing to go with a better solution if one presents itself. Simi
larly, creative writers often start a story without knowing how it will end; the ending emerges as they follow the logic of the evolving story.

How does this apply to creativity in the domain of everyday life? To take an absurdly trivial example, if you are giving a party and want to make sure that the seating arrangement around the dinner table is the most appropriate for a good mixing of the guests, it makes sense to prepare a seating plan. But if by the time dinner is ready you notice that some of the guests whom you had scheduled to sit side by side seem cool toward each other, you may want to change the plans at the last moment. And if the dinner turns out to be dull, you should try to match up people in different com
binations for coffee and dessert.

Such flexibility works only if you keep paying close attention to the process of solution and if you are sensitive enough to the feedback so that you can correct the course as new information becomes available. The reason most people prefer routine, tried-and-true solutions to their problems is that this requires less psychic energy. In fact, we could not afford to be creative all the time because we would soon stretch the limits of attention and collapse. Routine results in great savings. But it makes good sense to know how to come up with a creative solution when we need one and
can spare the effort.