Fluency, Flexibility, Originality

Today I got a letter from a friend who is thinking about taking up cake decorating again.  She claims the reason is because she needs another creative outlet, and oh, yes, she wants to be able to create roses out of icing.  It seems that unbeknownst to me, she used to create cakes for her family.  Remember when it was a 'mom' thing to make cakes shaped like cartoon characters or action heroes?  It was a talent to be able to make a ninja turtle.  As she pointed out, most moms in the 21st century don't have the time to spend half a day (or more) baking, cutting and icing creatively.  

One of the many things I love about this friend is she believes that creativity is important.  Her main creative outlet is card making.  She's right about creativity.  I can remember getting really depressed staying home with my infant daughter.  Everything that didn't involve the baby seemed so pointless - cook, clean up, mop floor, load dishwasher, empty dishwasher, make bed, dust, vacuum, on, and on, and on.  Way, way too much of my day was spent doing mindless repetitive chores.  Never once did anyone say,"WOW, what a clean floor!"   That's when I found needle crafts and sewing.  Creating clothes for the baby - after teaching myself how to sew - made all the difference to the stay at home life for me.

When I went back to teacher school, I actually took a class about Creativity.  It floored me to learn that after passing the age of seven, most people decide they aren't creative.  Our perception of creativity continues to narrow the older we get.  Here's the definition of creativity:  There are three components:  Fluency, Flexibility, and Originality.  The fluency element of creativity basically means you can generate a lot of ideas about a specific topic or problem.  The flexibility component means you can take an idea and rework it in unexpected ways.  Nevertheless, most of us continue to only consider the third component, originality, when we think about creativity.  In truth, everyone has the ability to be creative.  The trick is to convince yourself you are.

I think women give themselves more freedom to be creative.  Perhaps it's because in the not too distant past, most of us were stuck in either low end repetitive chore jobs, or home with people under three feet tall for years at a time.  Smart women figured out pretty quickly they would go bonkers or develop a love affair with alcohol if they didn't develop a talent or a skill.  Being creative makes you feel good about yourself.  It's a rush to make something, or exercise a talent.  Ironically, what you produce doesn't even have to be very good to get those positive feelings.  All you have to do is improve - even if it's only in your own eyes.  Looking back, my first sewing efforts and my first embroidery efforts were pretty pitiful.  It didn't matter a bit.  Solving the problems, understanding the patterns, developing the skills were all part of doing something that mattered to me in way that housework or cooking never did.  Creativity fosters passion.

Once you accept your personal creativity, then it naturally blossoms.  I'm more likely now to embrace the creative spirit when trying to solve a problem, and I often let it loose to come up with solutions.  For example, I'm so tired of the drabness of Arizona.  Everything is some shade of beige.  Bland, blah, dingy, and finally, depressing.  I like color.  I like being surrounded by color.  Inside the house, it's pretty easy - paintings, pottery, even furniture has color.  But once you step outside, beige and tan everywhere.  Well, this week I planted a complete flower garden in the front of my house - it's a riot of flowers of every shade and hue.  I spent the better part of an afternoon 'planting'.  I have tall flowers and short flowers and two dozen varieties; they span the entire front flower bed.  They are, of course, 100% silk, and they look marvelous, darling.  Creativity to the rescue.

I'm very interested in how other people tap into their own personal creativity.  What's your creative outlet?  How did you find it?  Did you specifically set out to find your creativity, or did you fall into it?  This inquiring mind wants to know.  If you read this blog, let me know how you are exercising your creativity.  And if you're not, why not?  (P.S.  -   "I'm not creative."  isn't an acceptable or even a true answer.)          

                

And the most famous quote about the weather is....

"Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it"......Mark Twain.

In my opinion more than half the interest about the weather is TALKING about it.  In Phoenix this week, everyone has been in a state of breathless anticipation.  The local weather station meteorologists have almost been peeing their pants with excitement over the freezing weather we've been experiencing.  Just to let you non Paradise Valley people into the loop:  Phoenix and surrounding environs are experiencing overnight temperatures below 32 degrees for four nights in a row.  Now, the record for most consecutive sub-freezing temperatures overnight in Phoenix was set in 1916.  That year there were 14 consecutive days of night temps below freezing, and we certainly aren't approaching that.  Four days, however, is unusual enough to send the area residents into a tizzy.  

When I first started coming regularly to Arizona, I was extremely amused to note year rounders  use the term 'freezing' anytime the temperature fell below 70 degrees.  They appeared in heavy coats or layered in shirts, sweaters, and coats even in 60 degree weather.  The accepted mantra: If you stay here over the summer for a few years, then your blood 'thins'.  Scientifically, this is not true, but Dr. Robert Lavender, a professor at the University of Arkansas, noting that blood is part of our thermoregulation system, has an explanation.  Our blood doesn't either get thin or thick, but rather the surface capillaries next to our skin either expand or contract more efficiently based on the prevailing weather where we live.  (Hot climate?  Surface capillaries expand to release heat.  Cold climate?  Those same capillaries contract to send blood into our body core to keep us warmer.)  When we suddenly arrive at a drastically different climate, our bodies are slow to adapt.  I think that means Sarah and Jay are going to be feeling cold this winter in Connecticut, and Paradise Valley residents also feel cold during their winter no matter how mild.  

I also suspect that expectation of a certain type of weather is a game our minds play with us. Seasons not only involve flowers and leaves but also temperatures.  Part of us wants winter each year just as we want Spring to come at the end of cold weather and leaves to change colors in the Fall.  I've lived in a seasons location and a non-seasons location - seasons are better.  Somehow, they establish a rhythm to the year that some hidden part of self misses when the seasons are absent.  Initially upon moving to the Gulf Coast, I was enchanted with the 80 degree Christmas day, but I tired of that quickly and came to resent warm winter weather and particularly holiday winter weather that involved wearing shorts.  Even here in balmy Phoenix, people are hopeful for a cold snap over the holidays.  You hear it expressed as, " I want to wear my Christmas sweater."

In some locations it's all about rain.  Overcast weather is some of my favorite because I've always been attracted to the cloudy day.  People who grew up in Arizona would have a hard sledding adapting to constant clouds.  New Orleanians get antsy if it stops raining for any significant period of days.  Their expectation is for it to rain every day during the summer.  In Portland it doesn't rain - it showers, drizzles, drips, spits, mists and fogs.  Portlandians are pretty defensive about their damp climate.  The overall sentiment is, "If you don't like the rain, MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE!"

Wind is an inexhaustible weather topic in Texas.  How many times have I heard, "Yeah, it's definitely springtime; the wind is blowing 30 miles per hour."  In Lubbock, Texas Tech students carry their goggles to protect their eyes from the springtime ritual of dust storms.  In the winter, 'wind chill' is discussed in reverent tones in the northern panhandle.  Wind always adds that unforeseen element to all Texas weather, and ruins more outdoor activities than rain.    Homesteading women committed suicide because they couldn't tolerate the seemingly constant wind one second longer.

My favorite poet is all about the weather.  William Carlos Williams, a doctor who scribbled his poetry between patients, is all about the image.  The images created by the seasons, and by the weather interacting with the landscape or the people living on it were favored topics.  Speaking of wind, he created a gem of a poem about wind:   

January

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed.  I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind, 
as before fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

I also fell in love with his definition of summer:  Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!  It's not a color.  It's summer!

So, how's the weather where you live?  I'd bet $100 you know exactly what it is and what it is going to be for the next day or so.  I just glanced outside.....and realized I've got to hop up, and rush outside to put a cover over my poinsettia bush.  After all; it's going to freeze here tonight.