Isabel Allende - Tales of passion

"There is a Jewish saying that I love. What is truer than truth? Answer? The story."

Sir Ken Robinson in a TED lecture

For years I watched as the arts programs in my kids' schools were slashed - art class gave way to more science classes, gym class was reduced to one hour a week, and computer science was anointed the new king of them all. Not that I have anything against computers. Heck, my relationship with my laptop falls just short of carnal. (Now there's a sentence you don't want taken out of context.) But I argued that kids in kindergarten didn't need computer skills as much as social skills and that it was more important to nurture and encourage their innate creativity.

My proposal fell on deaf ears so I did what a lot of stay-at-home moms armed with degrees and work experience did at that time - I volunteered for a lunchtime enrichment program. If the school board wasn't going to offer more opportunities for creativity, then volunteers would organize it and offer it to the children outside of school hours. You want to learn the trumpet? Done. You want to take karate lessons? Done. Paint, dance a Highland Fling and sing in a chorus? Done, done, done.

This TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson articulates everything I was trying to argue back then. All three of my children studied Liberal Arts before they went on to specialize in their various fields of interest (English Literature and Political Science, Finance and Economics, and Fine Arts and Literature as it turns out.) With a grounding in liberal arts, they learned how to think, developed the skills necessary to communicate effectively, and most importantly, they gained a lifelong passion for learning. If you want to run a company, it helps to know a bit about the world at large, don't you think?

Some salient points Robinson makes:

1. Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

2. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

3. We stigmatize mistakes, and we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

"Picasso said all children are born artists. We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it."

Everywhere, around the world, is the hierarchy of subjects in any school system.

Mathematics and languages is at the top.
Humanities comes next.
The arts are at the bottom.

He speaks of "a new ecology of the mind" just like the one we apply to the earth. "Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to re-think the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children."

Thanks to kcdyer and jamesmccann for bringing this to my attention. It's brilliantly funny and uplifting, and its message is clear and true. Put aside 20 minutes and have a listen. It's well worth it, for the Shakespeare bits alone.

Rob Forbes - Ways of Seeing

I am cursed with a wicked head cold and nasty cough which has turned my usual sweet, melodious voice (no really, I usually sound like a cross between Julie Andrews and Imogen Heap) into something resembling this:



So while I drag myself around the kitchen to make chicken soup and delicately dab at my nose, I'll invite you to watch this. TED lectures never disappoint.

For my photography friends, particularly those with an interest in street photography.

Rob Forbes is a designer and the founder of Design Within Reach. He prefers the title Streetwalker. He spends a lot of time in urban areas looking for and studying design in the public sector, taking about 5,000 photos a year. Check out his TED lecture. (If you go to the site, you can choose to watch it in high res.)

Amy Tan - Where does creativity hide?

Another great TED lecture. While you can just listen to it, you'll miss a lot if you can't see her clever slideshow. (Check out the TED COMMANDMENTS.)

She begins by asking the question "How do we create?"

The following words are Amy's but the emphasis is mine:

We all have intentions when we're faced with a situation, any situation. All of us have a response. We have intentions, what we think we should do. There's ambiguity. What we actually do, and what we think we should do. Do we justify by saying my intentions were good? That's the ambiguity.

You notice disturbing hints from the universe.

They were always there.

When I identify the question, distill the hints, clues, there's focus.

When you're writing, those hints, those clues have always been there. They've been obvious, yet not been. You need a focus. When I have a question, random things, all the flotsam and jetsam, become relevant, become obvious. There's no coincidence, serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe, but you may also explain it by saying you now have focus.

This leads to the question "why am I here?" What is the meaning of my life, what is my place in the universe. We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, yet it's necessary in writing a story. It's the place where I begin.

Sometimes we get help from the universe. There's the arrival of luck and random chance. Serendipity. Accidents.

I go back to the question, of how do I create my own life? It is by questioning. There are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, the specifics of that past and what is happening in this story at that point. By thinking about luck and faith, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, the synchrony of mysterious forces, I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. I have to think of my role, where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way or is it just something I came up with.

And I also can find that by imagining fully and becoming what is imagined and yet is in that real world, the fictional world, and that is how I find particles of truth not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. So there are never complete answers, or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer for me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating and that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story, in one story, then I come the closest to feeling compassion. Because for everything in that question of how things happen, it has to do with a feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that.

Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion. Become that story.

The Next 5,000 Days of the Web or The One

I happen to love the TED lectures as does my buddy kcdyer. This one dates from 2007 where Kevin Kelly explains the Web is only 5,000 days old, and wonders what the next 5,000 days will bring.

I think about my grandmother, who lived to be just shy of her 100th birthday. Born in 1889 in England, she traveled by ship to Canada and over her lifetime, she witnessed the birth of planes, cars, telephones, electricity in everyday life, indoor plumbing (she still kept a chamber pot under my bed when I visited,) computers, space travel...boggles the mind, no?

What are we going to see in our lifetime? I admit that although I love technology (I sound like Napoleon's brother, and if you get that reference, you get me) too much of it makes me long for a simple cabin in the woods. And when Kelly talks about The One, well, it's exciting, but part of me wants to run for the hills.

Believe in the impossible, he says. Hmm.

What do you think?