Parenting and Creativity: A Parallel

Among so many things to which this blog has, over the years, testified is the slow but steady increase of reflections that have only little to do with being a father. Or so it seems. No doubt, my fathering duties and responsibilities have changed. Yes, I would even say they have decreased. It is not only that two of my sons are virtually out of the house and living independently. In other words, it is not only that they have crossed that visible and material threshold of "leaving home." It is also my own unique idea about independence and ownership of one's own life that has been facilitating this material independence since long before they actually moved out. While they still are financially dependent, and likely will remain so for a number of years, I have always encouraged them to make decisions based on their own intuitions and insights about a given situation. One of the best and most rewarding outcomes of this way of fathering them has been to watch, time and again, how they can find maturity and strong ethical decision-making in themselves. This does by no means mean that their decisions will always look like mine. Why would they? After all they're my children, not my clones. Rather what I see is how life reinvents itself in my sons in this beautiful kaleidoscopic way in a new combination, and infinite landscape, of all its aspects. Bodyful and mindful aspects are coming together to form yet another instance of a body-mindful being, a person. I see or sense how they move and how they speak, how they play and how they work, how they love and how they ignore, how they socialize and how they seek solitude…Parenting for me has, above everything else, always been about being present to my children's unfolding. Only in situations of immediate danger or risk do I find myself in what one might call a more traditional parenting role, setting limits, giving advice, laying down the law.

I recognize that, seen in this light, being a parent, for me, is nothing but an extension of a more general way of being in the world: I am present to my partner, my friends, my clients, the people who enter and leave my world every day, I am present to the world itself..in all its beauty. But more importantly, I am also present to myself. Some may say that I made it easy for myself as a parent. Perhaps. Mostly what I hear from traditional parents is that they would find it very hard to "just be present" to their children. From this I conclude that their traditional ways are what's "easy" to them. And really I don't argue with "easy." This word connotates simply what's natural to me, what is congruent with my flow. "Natural" does not mean, though, that being present does not take up energy. It does. Lots of it. Our finite bodies and minds only give us a finite amount of energy and space to be present. And while we may experience the rush of infinity in being present, we will always also feel the exhaustion of the effort afterwards. And, so, here is the upshot of this long preamble: With two children out of the house much of the energy of being present to them is freed up, now waiting to be directed at new or old things. There is space to play, I am present to myself…and as wonderful as that sounds I have to get used to it.

I look at my guitar, my books, my bicycle, my garden, my house, my work . . . all of them offering me opportunities to play and be present to myself. All of them, at one time or another and sometimes for a prolonged period of my life, could provide me with space to be present to myself. They all had their moments in my unfolding, my development. But none of them really offer a return to them as as way of being present to myself, the way I was when I first engaged with them in the past.

I am bored. Bored not in a superficial and shallow way, but in a deep developmental way. It's the boredom that feels like emptiness, like space, like perhaps the emptiness that is meant in the book of Genesis. It's the emptiness out of which God creates the world. What a concept: God created the world, because God was bored! But then, in a rush of imagination, intuition, insight and joy God put the world together. And the best part of God's creative effort was and is that the creativity that made the world was also infused in it; so that the world itself is not a static and limited thing. Rather the world is open-ended process--all around. It bursts into its own newness again and again.

On a smaller scale this is what we feel when we're creative. We literally feel the bursting of such newness, at an almost unpredictable pace and scope. When we begin to create we enter a zone of unselfconsciousness. It's a zone in which our normal GPS-like ways of being in the world--planning and following the plan, making a list and following the list--makes way for an uncharted journey into a space we didn't even know was there. This journey  must involve our minds as much as it involves our bodies.

This latter thought is what is so troubling about how we are learning to approach creativity. We're led to believe that creativity is, first and foremost, an act of the brain. We believe that creativity is about insight, intuition, imagination, mindfulness, etc. We keep looking at catscans and MRIs to see what parts of the brain "light up" in a vain effort to "see ourselves" as we are being creative. And yet, every time we look creativity stops. Creativity is utterly non-narcissistic, it is utterly unselfconscious. When the creative "I" tries to "see" itself creativity is lost.

The problem is, however, as long as we understand creativity mainly as a brain-function, it will remain narcissistic and self-conscious, because the brain is also where the "I", the ego, resides. But creativity is as much a function of our bodies as it is one of our brains. And, the part of us that can really, truly move us out of a narcissistic hyper focus on the brain is our body. This means that we need to learn to how to trust and surrender to our bodies. I don't mean to say the body should go it on it's own. Our bodies can be narcissistic in their own ways. Mind and body need to go together. But the mind needs to be careful not to overdo it, not to restrain the body, not to shame the body. Similarly the body needs to be still when the mind creates. It must not interfere with restlessness or other needs. What creativity requires is what I described above as the superior role of parenting. Being creative requires that our mind and body can be present to each other. It requires that body and mind can be parent/present to each other.

Perhaps the greatest loss of a parent when his/her children move out is the loss of the mutuality of being present to each other. Parents and children are mutually engaged in a highly creative process. In this process they're present to each other. In it, parents are both mind to their children's bodies and bodies to their children's minds. Interestingly though, children also are both mind their parents' bodies and bodies to their parents' minds.

I often caution parents who use the phrase "I am proud of my son/daughter." Your son is not your work, I say. I stand by that. But it is an interesting idea to think that children and parents are each other's work. What a commitment it would be for a new father or mother to acknowledge this and to say to the child: I am ready for you to work on me. I am ready for your presence.