Deciding what to do

Recently I have been reviewing what to do, having spent many years doing it all, or rather trying to do it all.  I feel now I have come to the state in life when I need to edit things out.  This kind of editing has involved giving away of things I am not using; not going to events/shows/talks; editing out facebook and other social media contacts; getting out of mailing lists and also deciding what to do with work goals.

The Konmari method of cleaning out spaces uses the idea of throwing out anything that is not ‘sparking joy’.  William Morris suggested that everything in our house should be useful or beautiful (or both).

The author, Scott Sonenshein, says that the Konmari method is ‘not just about what we do to our physical space.  It’s about what we do to our mental space. Once we break that dependence that having more equals more happiness and more success” and apply the “spark joy” filter, we “can recognize what is most meaningful and important to us because it doesn’t get lost in clutter.’

However, it has taken me a long time (decades) to see what sort of rest of my life I want to lead.  So he says, ‘Deciding which projects to pursue may be more challenging for individuals beginning a new career, as they have yet to develop a strong sense of the work and environments they prefer.  However, just as the KonMari Method is structured so individuals can “calibrate before getting to sentimental items”, people may need time in their professional lives to gain a better sense of what “sparks joy” for them.’

Using the method by William Morris, one can decide if the project is not useful or creating something beautiful it is time to let go of it.  After all, we live short lives and in that time, we do not leave something behind that is beautiful or useful (and even both), then there is nothing to remember us by.  That leaving gift need not be a physical thing- it can be advice or love you give to another person.  For example, my Uncle did not leave me anything but his love and advice (which I use all the time).  He lives on in my life and also in my children’s lives as I recount things he used to say or do with me.

Worth watching this 12 minute funny TED Talk (assuming you are not offended by the language!)

Creative traditions

Every country has age old traditions that manifest themselves creatively in days of celebration.  But these traditions have become commercialised.  So in an age of mass produced goods and of artificial perfection where the sign of hands and any ‘errors’ have been carefully removed, it is good to make things by hand and make them not too perfect.  Easter offers one of those occasions where the hideous and unhealthy tradition of factory made ever larger chocolate eggs have captured children and parents’ hearts and stomachs.  On the other hand, many traditional Easter foods have been home made, free from additives and perhaps more healthy, if not entirely so.

Having an Armenian link in my family, I decided this year to make traditional Armenian Easter eggs alongside a traditional meal.  Making these Easter eggs involves using onion skins, turmeric and other natural dyes to colour eggs.  Here are some of my efforts.  I collected red onion skins- shopkeepers were happy to get rid of them.  I also put in some chilli flakes that I was not using (these also make the water red).  I boiled these for about twenty minutes and left it to cool overnight.  In the morning, I pasted some leaves I found in the garden on the raw eggs using water.  I used organic hens and duck eggs.  Then I put the eggs inside cut up old stockings and boiled them further for about 20 minutes. After removing them from the stocking, I left them to cool.  When they were cold to touch, I polished them with some olive oil to make them shine.  Even though the duck eggs were less successful, the over all effect of mottled colour with silhouettes of leaves, was charming on both types of eggs.  We ate those eggs with some goats cheese, yoghurt, traditional bread, olives and tomato and onion salad.  My children had been given some of the shop bought chocolate eggs but after eating lunch, they did not feel like eating those!  What did I do with the waste?  The skins were put in the compost and the leftover liquid was used to dye an old silk blouse.  No waste- a perfect end to Easter holidays!

Brain power

This is a sketch I made of my son aged 4.  The drawing was made using my left hand- I am right handed.  Apart from the facial features, all the other lines were drawn continuously without lifting the pen.

Using your less dominant hand and drawing in a different style boosts your creativity. It also lets you look at the world differently.  All the ‘mistakes’ in the drawing lend it a special touch and bring a portrait to life, as seen by another side of your brain.

Children, creativity and rules

Many books have been written about creativity and how it helps us.  But how is creativity fostered from an early age?  Children need boundaries and rules when they are little.  But after a certain age, they need to know more about values than rules.  What age would that be?  Each child is different but there is way to tell when they are ready to learn about the difference between rules and values.  That happens when you find them breaking rules too often- usually around the age of six.  That’s because they are actually asking to understand values that are behind the rules.  They internalise values more than a list of rules.  This understanding also results in the child being more creative because they can empower themselves to make up their own rules related to the values or principles.

Recently my son was being bullied which resulted in his coat being torn.  He was afraid of telling me or the teachers because he didn’t want to be ostracised from his group of friends.  When I found out, instead of being angry or telling him that he should have reported it, we had a discussion about bullying and why it is bad for everyone, including the bully.  He now understands how he will deal with it in the future.  We agreed that this is to be done progressively and according to the situation.  This may mean he ignores it if the bullying behaviour is small (or a just a ‘friendly tease’); if it is not, he tells the other child to stop, or he gets his friends together to help him with the situation and then finally if it does not stop, to get the teacher to intervene.  I am not there in the school with him but as long as he remembers the principle that ‘bullying is bad for everyone’, then he can deal with it by making his own rules and boundaries of what is acceptable to him.

The more rules there are at home, the more the risk they will be broken and followed by disappointment, anger and even retribution.  According to a study in a book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant, children who scored in the top 5% in creativity tended to come from households with, on average, less than one rule. The families of kids who were less creative typically had six rules.  The parents who talked to their children about principles leaving them to make up their own rules, found that the children were able to internalise that principle very well and find their own way around the world, instead of the parent ‘micro-managing’ them.  ‘Instead of enforcing them, [creative] parents got their children to endorse the rules themselves because they helped to generate them’, according to Grant. I had parents who loved us but always tended to help us out while dealing with problems.  It is only now that I am learning about the world and dealing with the difficulties it presents.  So now I am determined not to do everything for my children, because I love them.

The Flame of the forest

This seems a pretty picture- it is of one of my favourite flowers- Flame of the forest (Butea monosperma)- a medium-sized dry season-deciduous tree, which grows in the tropics.  It is found in a forested part of Delhi, where I grew up and seeing these flowers reminded me of springtime.  In my native West Bengal, the poems and songs of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, likened its bright orange flame-like flower to fire. In Santiniketan, where Tagore lived, this flower has become an indispensable part of the celebration of spring. I used to love these flowers.

However, the same forest became associated with murder in late summer of 1978 when siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra were kidnapped and brutally murdered.  On their way to the radio station to present a youth programme, the children were kidnapped for ransom.  On learning their father was a naval officer, both were killed instead and the girl, Geeta, was allegedly raped before being murdered. Both were bright young people- Geeta was a 16 year old second year college student and Sanjay, was 14-year-old school student.

I was very young but I remember the impact of the murders.  Suddenly parents were cautious about where their children were going, suspicious of strangers and our world changed from being happy and carefree to fear and mistrust.  The city which had never experienced such a heinous murder was traumatised and all energy was directed to finding the killers. It was my first loss of childhood innocence- the flowers which I loved, grew in a forest where children had been murdered.  I came to associate these flowers with blood.  Years later as an adult, coming across these flowers accidentally, I wondered if I could change my fear to joy again.  So this was painted.

The ‘bark’ of the trees is made from newspaper cuttings about the murders and the stylised flowers, with their curved and spiky forms, represent my fear.  However by painting this, I have made my fear disappear and understand the sadness from those murders.  It may be because I am older and it may be because exactly 20 years later on the day when the culprits were caught, I had a son, who helped me to see the world in a different way.  So the painting is curiously sad but optimistic by its brightness and exaggeration.  Like these flowers that bloom in the spring and wither away in the heat, whose leaves fall in the winter, leaving a skeletal bareness, our lives are informed by sadness and joy, by gain and loss.  This painting connects me to my childhood and my adulthood and to that of my son.  The sadness of the loss remains but the fear has gone.  Art has become a therapy.

connections

I saw this last week- a 49ft-long 3D artwork celebrating ‘Star wars’, set underneath a humble bridge in London. It was created by 3D artists Joe and Max to celebrate the UK launch of the Rise Against The Empire play set.  A good drawing in itself but what made it great was the way it got people engaged with it.  Kids and adults pretending to hang perilously from the edges of buildings, people walking around it trying to understand how the simple perspective of the drawing made it so cleverly three dimensional; and passersby reverentially walking at the edges. Or people simply pretending that they were in a Star Wars movie underneath a London Bridge, accompanied by the sounds of ships, laser fire and droids.  What fun!

Art is about being fun, creative and engaging people.

17 minutes

17 minutes are what is needed for your brain to completely focus on something or relax- our brain works in 17 minute cycles.  This summer, my sons and I went on 17 minute breaks during our trip to Venice to either pause and reflect on what we had seen or experienced or to take a ‘sketching break’.  This is one of my 17 minutes sketches from Murano-

Tourists busy taking selfies, stopped to watch us sketching. In this harried world where photographing oneself is more important than observing things, they were perhaps surprised to see two boys (one in his late teens), sketching.  Bad moods and waiting times were happily passed by these moments.  Below is another one from Torcello, done while waiting for a boat to take us back to the hotel.  People were respectful and thoughtful.  One of them even started ‘crowd control’,  to make sure that I had a clear view- this without saying even one word!  How powerful is that?!

My sketch book has been travelling with me and my children since then.  I think we have learnt a powerful lesson- that creativity is power!  You don’t have to sketch but you can write or even relax.  In the corporate world, people are taking 17 minutes breaks after working for 52 minutes (not sure where that comes from!).  Ted talks are also that length so that people focus.

Goal setting- one lesson from my son

My children teach me things in many different ways.  Last week, I learnt about always having the bigger picture and goal before my eyes rather than busyness and details.

I asked my son what his GCSE results were before we went off on holiday. He said that he did not care too much about the GCSE results because the result he wanted was already there. He had got admission into the Sixth form college of his choice and so he wasn’t worried. I had to be content with his thinking and marvelled at how he always kept the goal before the details.  During our holiday, we learnt that my son had achieved great results- almost all were A* and rest were all As.

This led me to think about how we can get carried away by details so much that goals just vanish, like the forest in the trees.  I also looked at how my son studied- he didn’t seem to be doing very much but what he was doing was working holistically.  So everyday he could study a bit of all his exam subjects, not one subject a day.  As a result of this wisdom from my son, I decided the following steps to goal setting-

• Decide your goal
• Work out the steps need to achieve it- these steps need not be equal, all they need to be are different steps to achieve your goal
• While working on the steps, always check it with the goal to see if they still match or in case, your goal has changed.
• Very important– work each day on all the steps, i.e as if they were working holistically.
• Don’t worry if all the steps are not completed in the final process, as long as the goal is reached.
• And don’t worry anyway about the details as long as the goal is reached!

So if you are writing a book, work on all the book chapters each day.  The chapters will change but the title of your book won’t so you can chop and change the chapters, working together, to achieve that aim.

Creativity and Children

(My son at the Serpentine Pavilion, 2015)

I have two children- one is now a teenager and the other one, nearly one.  For all their lives and most of mine (and there were seven pregnancies with two live births), I have worked, starting with my first lowly job as a teenager working as a receptionist for a dentist.  I am now an architect, author and artist.  My children have always seen me working inside and outside the home.  Therefore I was surprised to view this recent broadcast on BBC Two (3rd July 2015) presented by the model and entrepreneur Lily Cole ‘to debate whether having children inhibits or enhances an artistic lifestyle’.  Perhaps, not surprisingly, the people she interviewed were mostly women- only one man appeared. Gavin Turk, the artist, was also interviewed but together with his wife, Deborah Curtis, who is also an artist.  The programme was based around the infamous quote by the critic Cyril Connolly, ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. One got the feeling that Lily Cole, who was then eight months pregnant, was exploring her own fears about whether she would continue to be creative after the birth of her child.  Barbara Hepworth also featured- how did she manage to be creative despite having four children, including triplets?  But the possible dilemma of her husband, Ben Nicholson, the artist, was ignored.  So I wondered if Cole meant to imply that this is a woman’s problem only?

The modern creatives- Holly McNeish, the spoken word poet, and Turk and Curtis- were sanguine and funny about the whole experience- breastfeeding in a public toilet, bringing babies to art shows, and doing those other crazy things parents have to do when they don’t have childcare, either paid or unpaid.  My life was like that too- I brought my sons to business meetings, construction site visits, art shows and lectures and I know of other parents who did that too.  Lionel Shriver, the author, who has chosen to be childless, spoke about the socio-politics of why and how only ‘white’ people were choosing to be childless or having less children- though her theories might be debatable (she appeared to have forgotten entirely about China, for instance).  This led me to think more deeply about my experience of having children. I believe my children have made my life more creative, not less.  It is far more simpler not to have to think about feeding and nurturing another person, about not having to argue with a teenager about pocket money, etc- instead just concentrating on being creative.  But is creativity limited to just what you produce?  Or is it about how you lead your life?  My life with children has really enhance how I live my entire life with creativity.  And I am proud that they are also known as creative people in themselves.  There will always be people, who choose not to have children (like my beloved Uncle) but those who care and nurture others (like my Uncle did with me).   I have creative friends, who are childless, and they enjoy my children’s company.  Creativity does not depend on whether you have children or not, it is a state of being, that continues, regardless.