highly sensitive power

“If you want to improve,
be content to be thought
foolish and stupid.”

~ Epictetus

Life’s a lab. We experiment, starting with a question (curiosity). Creativity is about risking mistakes in search of satisfying answers.

What we often mean when we say we’re not creative about something is that we’ve stopped trying. Even the most dazzling artist or engineer or sideways-thinking marketing executive or homeschooling parent or highly sensitive group leader has failed, in the sense of tried something that didn’t lead to the result they were questing for. But their reach exceeded their gasp. They reached again, tweaked the reach, tried again, and arrived at dazzle.

Creativity is about making a decision. It’s about deciding to play with possibilities. Or just deciding to play. Framing creativity as play can help take the seriousness of expectation out of the equation – a useful shift, since serious expectation often stifles the exact thing required by creativity’s mandate: try, try again.

The power of creativity – of play – for highly sensitive people is that it can cut through the particular challenges of being an HSP in a predominantly non-HSP culture. Creativity as a state of play relaxes and encourages, engages, lightens, frees us. And it connects us with what’s bigger than we are.

So grab the hooked end of a question mark and hang on until you’re flying in the direction you want to go. Every time you touch ground, try again. Pay attention to what made you land and try something different. Pile up the attempts and climb to the top and look around. And try again.

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

~ David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear