Breathing Life Into Creativity

There is a new TED talk this month, by designer Stefan Sagmeister (thanks to my friend, Chic Monk for the head’s up). In it Sagmeister describes the results of an innovative scheme of time off and the amazing way it boosted his life and income. His idea, incredibly simple in a way, was to take 5 years out of his retirement and insert them into the 40 or so that he projected to be his working life (age 25-65).

Thus he would take a full year sabbatical every seven years.

Now, for those of us in academia this is common sense: give a great mind a year off every so often and amazing things will come (or, in a more cynical view, give someone a year under the iron fist of “publish or perish” and he/she will indeed publish). But for most people, the idea of taking a full year off every seven years might sound a bit crazy, as if the whole year would be devoted solely to what has otherwise been squeezed into weekends and that precious ten days (in the US, vs 20 or so in Europe) of vacation time each year.

This brings me to think of the topics of time off, creativity, mental freedom, and happiness.

Just last week, a Spanish friend of mine remarked in astonishment that we in the US only have 5 or 10 days of paid sick leave (if we’re lucky). In Spain, and in fact much of Europe, if you’re sick, your simply sick. You take time off and you lose no pay. If this means 3 weeks, okay. If it takes 6 months, for cancer for example, okay. There’s no question. If you’re sick, you focus on getting well – not juggling illness with making a living, often to disastrous results.

America’s ideals seem so distant from that ideal (unfortunately). Instead we are pushed to earn and produce, even in academia.

But taking time off? Simply relaxing and devoting yourself to you, to your personal and/or spiritual pursuits. This, as I mentioned above, has an odd ring to many in the US. But one of the things I love most about Buddhist Studies is that it gives us a mirror, a clear “Other” by which to reflect on ourselves. Sometimes what is odd to us is the norm somewhere else in the world, and sometimes so much so for the better. And having lived in Europe (the UK, at least), I challenge USA folks (because Canadians follow the Europeans) to justify our work ethic.

Why so much? Could it be connected with our relatively low levels of self-reported life satisfaction? Could it be connected with our general poor health (despite the most advanced medical technology in the world)? Why is it that Europeans generally pay a bit higher taxes, off-set by free/subsidized health-care, work less, and are happier?

As for my own meandering thoughts… Time off is good. I look at a good friend, Margaret, who is now done with her Ph.D., and revisions for publication, and articles, and presentations, and now… is relaxing. And it’s wonderful. This freedom for creativity is put in contrast by another friend (from my London days), this one in Pakistan, writing of the difficulties as a professor in violent times. And somewhere in the middle are Sjors (creative genius in London), Kristen (ditto in Vancouver), and Amod, (philosopher outside of Boston, MA).

And then there is my own life, and that of fellow PhD student Loden Jinpa, which is simply overwhelmed with often self-wrought responsibilities and demands and possibilities and so forth. The world seems so open to us, at least me, having no classes and just a dissertation to write, and yet the “little” things we do take on wind up being so large, and important, and time-consuming, that we easily become as overwhelmed as any 9-5’er out there.

But… I know from experience that life as an academic can open up opportunities for breathing life into creativity. I remember very well… four years ago now, as I took time off from my second MA to fully complete my first. I had no job. I took one class (a graduate seminar on Hegel, it was great), and otherwise simply mused on life and worked on my MA thesis (one reason I love blogging is the ability to look back and see what I was up to then).

That time to simply sit and at time struggle with basic ideas and many not-so-basic ideas was a pivotal time in my life. The result was in part a mark of “with Distinction” on my MA, but, more importantly it was a time of opening of philosophical ideas and understanding for me personally. And, I would add, this opening was something I have happily shared with students as a university instructor and T.A. It is a feeling of crawling into the ideas and lives of past individuals and philosophers so as to fully sympathize with them (and then to critically examine their claims). This does not come easily. Openness to others’ ways of life must be cultivated, in ways not describable in this post but certainly worthy of exploration.

Ahh, but that openness. That returns us to the idea of breathing life into creativity. Creativity requires an openness. Some may say that it is an inner openness but this is to miss the deep realization that there is no inner which is not also outer. That is to say that our innermost feelings and thoughts ultimately originate from out there, from others, perhaps our parents, perhaps favorite teachers or poets or philosophers of the past. The more we look inward with clarity, the more clearly we see the world around us.

And that, I think, is the gift of time off. Of sabbatical. Of retreat in the Buddhist tradition.

As we creep into the lives of others we “break the borders” of self-other ideas we might have had in the past. As we creep more into our own lives, we see that who we are is often just a convoluted story we’ve pieced together from circumstance and memory. But really we are the marvelous produce of mother and father, energy and sustenance, and so forth – building-blocks. Every human, and every human creation is this.

It reminds me of one Buddhist teacher’s translation of upekkha as “disenchantment.” With wisdom we give up clinging to “my ideas, brilliance” and so forth and accept that it all is interconnected. But, at the same time we are not de-tached from these; we are neither attached nor detached, but non-attached.

And that, I suppose, meanders well enough into the following talk, which itself meanders a bit. But before I let you go, I do want to re-emphasize the importance of taking time off. It may be impracticable to most of us in the US, but do consider trying.http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf