Tag: ‘inspiring

A better question

Neera

I am reading Mark Mason’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck where I got struck by an interesting point.

Mark writes when asked “What do you want out of life?” most people respond by saying something like, “I want to be happy, have a great family and a good job.” This response is so common and expected that it doesn’t really mean anything.

We all want these things. We all want to lead a carefree, happy and easy life, fall in love, have amazing relationships, look perfect, be admired and respected by everyone.

Everybody wants that because it is easy to want that.

But there is a better question. A question we never ask ourselves but turns out to be a much greater determinant of how our lives turn out to be.

That question is, “What pain do we want in our lives? What are we willing to struggle for?”

Asking about pleasure is easy. Pretty much all of us have a similar answer.

The more interesting question is about the pain. What pain do we want to sustain? That is a hard question. But it is a question that matters. A question that will actually get us somewhere. A question that can change a perspective, a life.

We can’t have pain-free lives. Our lives can’t be all roses and unicorns. We have to choose something.

The bad thing is our lives are full of struggles. The good thing is we can choose our struggles.

By choosing what we are willing to struggle with, we can decide which direction we want to take our lives.

Four stages of Creative Process

Neera

English socialist and social psychologist Graham Wallas proposed four stages of the creative process in his book The Art of Thought, published in 1926.

These stages are:

  • Preparation
  • Incubation
  • Illumination
  • Verification

The preparation is the feeding stage. Your brain is hungry for knowledge, so you got to feed it. At this stage, your brain is like to sponge, soaking in everything, storing it, and making subconscious connections.

During the incubation stage, your brain is still making connections. Forcing it to come up with a unique and special idea during this stage is asking for too much. Let it do its work. It knows there is all this good material it has stored in its files. It hasn’t indexed that material yet.

Illumination is the stage when your brain comes up with great ideas, connecting pieces you had been looking for, causing you to leap out of your chair and scream “EUREKA!” These “lightbulb moments” happen at all sorts of awkward places—in the shower, just before you fall asleep, on long walks alone, or on a solitary drive in the car.

In the final stage, called verification, your brain takes that beautiful, shining lump of clay and molds it into the perfect statue. It evaluates the idea, verifying that it is a realistic idea, and starts building the surrounding framework to bring it to life.

The Art of Thought is out of print, but the following excerpt from it beautifully explains that our brain can be in one or all of these four stages at a time. They are constantly overlapping each other as we’re exposed to new exploration and experiences.

In the daily stream of thought, these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a businessman going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance, by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.”

Source: Brain Pickings

A story that will touch your heart

Neera

As you can tell, I am a collector of everyday stories. Here is another one:

One afternoon, Martha Sweeny, was in a coin laundry outside her hometown of stonewall Texas, when half a dozen young motorcyclists suddenly roared up to the gas station next door.

They were all a boisterous, rough-looking lot, and one of them—younger than the other, no more than seventeen—was the loudest and roughest-acting of the bunch.

With several of his friends, the boy entered the laundry, and then something happened when he looked around this small, rural town—and, especially when he notices this older woman observing him.

In one of those revealing moments we’ve all lived through, Martha made eye contact with the boy and saw him hesitate.

Later, after his friends had gassed up their cycles, he told them his starter was on the blink to go on without him. He said he’d catch up.

After the others went roaring off, the boy brought some dirty clothes into the laundry. “His shoulders sagged as if he were terribly weary.

Dust and grease and sweat-stained his shirt and jeans. A beginning beard faintly shadowed his chin and leans cheeks. He turned briefly, our eyes met again. Emotions flickered across his face—doubt, longing, pain?”

Moments later, he ran his clothes through the washer and dryer, then disappeared into the men’s room.

When he emerged ten minutes later, he was wearing clean pants and shirt and he had shaved his scraggly beard, scrubbed his hands and face, and even combed his hair.

He now grinned in Martha’s direction and jumping on his motorcycle, zoomed away.

Not following the others, but going back the way he’d come—back toward home.

Every time I read this story, I get a lump in my throat. And that is the aim of the stories. To evoke emotion. To bring out a single tear.