Transmit or transform
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“How you live changes your brain.” —Milton Glaser
Far too often, stories about creative people are framed by a tortured-artist narrative. It’s easy to cite extreme examples—Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath—and argue that illness and suffering produces great art.
But it’s simply untrue.
Selection bias makes it tempting to conclude that some kind of black hole of despair is a necessary ingredient in the creative process. Worse still, that way of thinking overlooks the possibility that even better work might have emerged had these people found better ways to cope with pain and loss.
When it comes to life experiences—from joy to suffering—that shape our work, you and I have two choices: we either transmit our feelings or we transform them. We either amplify what we know, or we find a way to let it change us. That’s what American writer and educator Parker Palmer is getting at when he says that the heart is either shattered or broken open.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov understood this, too. He grew up in a punishing environment under the cloud of an abusive father and endured a period of crushing poverty.
Instead in adulthood, he developed what Robert Greene describes in his book The Laws of Human Nature as “the ultimate freedom.”
Chekhov made a deliberate decision to let go of the self-sabotaging behaviour that had cursed generations of his family. In its place, he chose to see things he’d endured from a point of view of deep empathy. That change shaped his writing and earned him a reputation in late 19th century Moscow as a man of deep generosity and kindness.
Greene sum it up best. If we assume a negative attitude toward life, it becomes our prison. “But this is not how it has to be. The freedom that Chekhov experienced came from a choice, a different way of looking at the world.”
We are either the product of our experiences or we transcend them. The choice is yours.
Very best, Patrick
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