On Sir Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity

I've watched this video almost 5 times already and can't believe how he's just right on the dot.  I've been resonating with any information that talks about creativity.  What stifles it.  What unleashes it.  What nurtures it.  I've been at it for the longest time.  Most of it has been a result of quiet desperation because of how I find that my circumstances always become a palette of creative repression or creative opportunity.  It goes to and fro.  This pendulum.  Sometimes it makes me crazy.  Sometimes it stirs up undiscovered reserve of strength.  

So I realized that I'm not an alien to be inclined to things like these.  But still it becomes a struggle when you walk around situations where nobody understands the language you speak and you feel like a foreigner in your own workplace because you just see things differently.   

It's always been that way for me.  Trying to fit in a linear mold.  In school.  In interactions.  In organizations.  In work environments.  I started discovering that not everything has to be linear when I joined an elective in graduate school that taught me a lot about creativity and how the arts tap into a reservoir of potential that lies inside yourself waiting to be discovered.  It seems ironic for business schools to teach their students how to view things in a creative way.  But for me, it was home.

I like the off-tangent metaphors that cuts across financial statements, operational workflows, leadership principles and faith fueled values.  It makes sense and I didn't have to turn my brain upside down to get it. I just did.  So this was how I approached everything onwards.  It was also what moved me to deepen my spiritual life because what didn't make wordly sense was something I could always understand in a spiritual sense.

Changing your mind about how you think about something is the hardest thing to do.  And I've had to change my mind again and again about a lot of things especially in the workplace.  It gets tiring, especially now.  But I'm hoping to keep at it and find myself growing my creative capacity and my spirit.

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know,  they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.  Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What  we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything  original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're  now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can  make. And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities. [Sir Ken Robinson]

adimari's album "photo stories:cebu"
this is me taken at an old museum during our trip together in 2007.

focus

obscurity has its tale to tell,
like the figure on the studio-bed corner,
out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.
Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable
making of a jar of pencils, typewriter keyboard more than they were.

veridical light.

earth budges.  now an empty coffee-cup,
a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on
their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand
of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.

- by adrienne rich

Uncovering

adimari's album "traces in spaces"

Imagine yourself sitting behind a desk with a lot of ideas running through your head.  They turn to a hazy wave of noise as soon as your phone alerts.  A text message.  "Following up the price quotation for the brochure..."  You're tapping you pen and waiting for 4 hours and still it hasn't arrived.  This price quotation that's supposed to tell you of your future ability to seal the deal by 2012.  On the other side of your brain you're thinking about that conversation you had with your boss about a disgruntled officemate who doesn't believe in your capability to lead the group because she thinks she knows better.  The phone rings, "Ma'am please help me follow up the costing department because they're taking a bit of time." Your account officer says in desperation.  

Your fingers start to feel paralyzed against the keyboard and your back starts to feel strained because of shifting and shuffling restlessly on your office chair.  You haven't eaten lunch and your throat starts to feel dry.  You're thinking about the press run of a book you're printing for the first time and how the proofreader missed out a very important detail that cost a huge a mount of waste because the error was spotted after everything has been printed.

The emails pour in and your requests for additional computers have been approved.  You're thinking about the limited space and how long it will take for decisions to be made so that you can get moving with the expansion project.  

It never ends.  It's like a cycle of events that loop endlessly like a broken record.  

This is how my life has been for the past 3 months.  But if I would characterize my life a little bit better, it's a constricted flow of creativity.  Always caged in and aching to be expressed.  In my resourcefulness I try to find ways of living with the limitations of the circumstances that threaten the full expression of creative potential.  I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.  

This page will hopefully chronicle these moments and in careful observation hopefully find answers to how one can live through these limitations and still find the fulfillment of being able to create and make a difference every moment.