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As I grow older, I think more about what’s going to happen over the next several years. Will I still be here next year and tomorrow? Have I accomplished all I wanted to professionally? Will my contributions matter? Will I be missed when I’m gone?
I also think about creativity a lot as writers are predisposed to do. The last thing I want to do is write boring sentences that no one cares about and, I fear, this may be one of them. Boredom blows.
I gravitate towards books about the brain and intelligence and this is because I wish I had a faster brain and was more intelligent because, whether true or not, I believe I would write better and more people would be interested in what I write. Maybe they are already, but it doesn’t feel that way, and one hundred years from now and really even tomorrow that won’t amount to a colony of ants.
Ant colonies notwithstanding, I recently read a book on the topic of geniuses called Spark: How Genius Ignites, From Child Prodigies to Late Bloomers by Claudia Kalb. It’s an exploration of the lives of 13 people we’ve heard of such as Pablo Picasso, Grandma Moses, and Maya Angelou. The thrust of the book is that some of these people hit it big with their greatest contributions early in life in their twenties and thirties or in some cases as children such as Shirley Temple. These are called child prodigies.
There’s another group of super high achievers called mid-lifers who reach their most productive and creative heights in their forties and fifties. And there are the late bloomers who find their strides and churn out their greatest work all the way into their nineties. These older people who produce great work give me hope that I will too.
I have wished for many years to have been one of these so-called geniuses, because being wicked smart has many advantages such as better paying jobs. But now that I’ve read the stories of their lives I realize many of them had tragedies in their lives: brothers dying, a parent dying when they were young, relatives struck with horrible diseases.
Maya Angelou was raped as a young woman – as heinous and horrible as anything imaginable – and yet persisted to become a writer who told her truths with uncommon power and resonance. She became a famous and well-regarded writer – something I aspire to.
One lesson from all of this is no one – not even the famous artists we’ve all heard of – gets there without pain and suffering and often incredibly lonely existences or rare personality traits that make them awkward socially. Just because you become famous for what you do as a supremely talented person at a specific discipline is no guarantee you’ll be happy. There are a few passages in the book that struck me with particular force, and I wanted to share them with you then explain why I felt this way.
Don’t Do What People Expect
Pablo Picasso, a world-renowned painter, shares insights about the importance of creating something original.
“Most painters make themselves a little cake mold; then they make cakes. Always the same cakes. And they’re very pleased with themselves. A painter should never do what people expect of him. A painter’s worst enemy is style.”
I hope it’s apparent to you here – though I could be flat wrong – that what I’m writing here is not what you would expect to read. I am telling you what I care about by lifting the passage above into this article. I care about writing in ways you are not used to and don’t anticipate and maybe wonder about and don’t quite understand or care about. You may not care for how I’m writing this. I don’t want to write anything predictable because you’ve already read plenty of that.
The surprise is what I’m after to energize myself. The surprise of how many sentences I am writing on this topic. The surprise of how long this keeps going on. The surprise that this book I read is getting so much of my reflection and consuming your time reading about. The surprise is that today I feel like an endorphin factory.
Creative Genius is Courageous and Daring
In a similar way of thinking – about the goal of stretching ideas and doing what’s not like everyone else with words – I am eager to share this passage written by the author, dressed up with an uplifting quote from a college professor.
The author writes: Creative genius is courageous and daring and forward-thinking in its very nature – otherwise how would it represent change? Picasso and his fellow creators leaped into the unknown before others were ready to go.
“They continued to take chances in pursuing their unique visions,” said Dean Keith Simonton, a University of California at Davis psychology professor, writes in his book Greatness. “Hence, the willingness to take creative risks often brings with it a special knack for alienating the public.”
All artists, I sense, want to be liked and admired. But we can’t be concerned with that. Taking risks in the sentences we write or paintings we paint has to be an internal exploration of what’s going on in the most intensely personal places in ourselves. It’s down there where the splurges of new ideas are brought forth. Whether the public likes it or not, the art must become what it is meant to become or it is not really anything at all. Whether others like it has no relevance. If the writer believes it’s valuable, then it is.
All That Happens to Us is a Resource
At the beginning of this piece of writing I noted how difficult the lives of many of these geniuses were. They may be famous now for the art they produced or the businesses they launched, but their lives were bad events. They dealt with emotional stress and hopelessness and fears. They were like the rest of us, navigating life, trying to do something important. It was a journey focused on survival and making sense of things and producing art and creating useful and beautiful products that at one time didn’t exist. This passage gets at this theme. I think it’s from one of the writer “geniuses” in the book but I can’t remember which one because my note-taking here has a hole in it that I don’t feel like closing because I want to get on with the point. Maybe it was this guy, Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian poet.
“A writer – and I believe generally all persons – what happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us – including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments – all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
I have seen bad things happen in my life. At the top of that list was when my 16 year old high school friend and baseball teammate died in a car accident. There have been too many other horrific events. 9/11 always comes to my mind when I look back on life. Other friends have died. My Mom and Dad have died. I’ve been sick several times. There are difficulties and they keep coming my way as I’m sure they do with you also because all of us experience difficulties. I wish this wasn’t so.
The best way to look at all these difficulties from a writing perspective is that they become useful feelings and emotions when trying to write how I really feel, why I write, and what prompted me to read this book. The bad things that happen are part of my life and part of my writing. So are the good things. It all gets mixed together and something gets written such as this, and I suppose that’s meaningful at least to me.
Tell the Truth
It’s hard to be honest in our world. Hurting people by telling them something about them bothers you is something we often avoid. Awkward tensions are not something we seek out. Telling an employee they’re not competent enough to do the job they were hired to do is about as harsh as it gets. “You, so and so, aren’t smart enough.” When I’ve been told this, it has crushed me.
There it is – honestly. If you’re intellectually arrogant, if you come across as thinking you’re smarter than me, there’s no chance we’re going to get along. This is my truth.
Maya Angelou was quoted in this book about truthfulness.
“What I have tried to do in all my work is to tell the truth and tell it eloquently.”
In her writing she revealed, more so than most writers, how she really felt, how much she hurt, what happened to her as a child that none of us could possibly understand unless we have been through the same horror: being raped. It’s hard to write honestly. It makes me feel vulnerable. You may be able to use what I tell you about myself against me.
But I must be truthful as Maya has been. It may hurt. People may be turned off. This is so important that the repercussions can’t be factored in. Reveal how you feel, not how you think your reader wants to read about how you feel.
I feel good. This book gave me hope and insight on how to write better and that is what I care a whole lot about. I feel a bit scared that I am this old and getting older and worry about illness that may be forthcoming. Seems inevitable and I don’t like that because I want to control how the rest of my life unfolds. Control – it’s not what any of us ultimately have.
Old Age – A Time To Explore Whatever You Wish
I’m kind of old. Not really old, but getting there. Never thought I would be in this situation yet here I am. I think about how I want to live the rest of my life, how I will get sick eventually, with what illness, how much it will hurt, and how I will die.
There is another way to think about my situation and I hope you see it the same way as you grow older. For most of my life I have had to do more or less what someone else wanted me to do especially at work. When I retire that will no longer be a burden. In the mornings when I wake up I can sit down and write, go for a run, meet someone for a cup of coffee, do whatever. This sounds like real freedom America so often brags about. In the book there’s a passage by writer Oliver Sacks that got me jazzed about aging from the perspective of being liberated in ways not possible earlier in life.
“I do not think of older age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious (fake) urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
Now is the stage of life when I will be doing a lot of synthesizing of what I think and have experiences and what all of it has meant and whether any of it matters in the long run. This is the time to bring all I’ve learned together into some sort of cohesive narrative or maybe not cohesive but with more richness. I will be distilling all I accomplished and didn’t and all the pain I felt and the hopes I’ve had and the people I’ve met – the ones I liked and didn’t – to somehow write something that I want to. Whether it resonates with anyone else is beyond my control. If it makes me feel fulfilled and has me thinking I made what happened in my life more clear or meaningful, that will be all that matters.
Opportunity to Inspire Someone Else
I want to finish up this book review with how I feel about what I do and why I do it. By what I do I mean writing as I am right now.
Sara Blakeley, an entrepreneur, is one of the geniuses focused on in the book. She puts in perspective what she’s really trying to do with her life beyond making money. Simply and admirably, she captures how I feel about what I do.
“If I have the opportunity to inspire somebody else and encourage you that you have what it takes as well to go out there and give it a try, and to continue to believe in yourself then there’s nothing greater than why I’m here and what this is all about.”
For the rest of my life I am dedicated to lifting my own life to the most productive levels possible. This is not the end. I’m just getting started.
It feels exciting.
Reading this book sparked that excitement.
Author Profile
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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