Tag: creative practice

You do you, and learn from others

How to Be Incomplete

Cultural leaders are a funny bunch.

We self-select for special as a personality characteristic, an experience quality, a social value, an aptitude, and later — after training and many more experiences — a competent set of skills and frameworks.

The first lesson of leadership is listen.

For, management it’s messy.

Planning… things don’t go to plan.

Coaching and consulting is cyclical and circuitous, borne of curiosity less than certainty.

For balance, a phrase is emerging. Something like, bend and break, both.

Each loop I go into my own subjectivity (and out of ignorant bias) takes me to this insight that not one of us arrives at leadership complete.

Confident and clever, yes.

Right and righteous, yes.

But never complete.

Sunlight sharpens the shape of shadow. We already/always/also comprise a self, and a far more definite sense of what we are not.

Descartes… oh honey, dessert!

Normality is Nonsense

I’m reading about elephant blood this morning. Such a large animal needs a unique diet. Tiny creatures do, too. Several research studies discuss the differentials between East Asian elephant species, but this one compares elephants who do different jobs. If you’re a circus animal, these findings are statistically significant.

Not all circus elephants are low in magnesium (Mg) and phosphorus (P) – only middle-aged females. These two trace minerals are required for healthy protein absorption in red blood cells. The study finds some basic equivalencies between circus elephants and their wild-roaming peers. They all eat bananas, as it turns out, and potassium levels are about the same for all the elephants in the study. But as the circus females age, they lose Mg and P at higher rates than circus males. Females in the wild don’t have this problem.

The study concludes that data from wild animals is best to establish the normal dietary bases for trace minerals in males and females. Circus females are treated as an anomaly. Very few studies investigate the right nutrient compound for circus elephants, especially the ladies.

Makes sense, until it doesn’t. The notion that their nutritional needs compare to wild animals is poppycock. Further, it may be bunk to search for the solution in science

What is normal and who measures? 

The question itself may be the place where the sciences and arts are cleaved. Our inquiry methods are so similar, but they were pulled apart. Before industrialization, disassembling human bodies (and dissembling about it) was as covert and fashionable as Shakespeare. Activities after nightfall at a time when the circus came of age.

The Enlightenment – a potent combination of power, patriarchy, and patronage – brought scientific thought into the daylight and left the other logics in the bordello. Science began to pull apart humane knowledge, dissecting it into knowable parts, never quite acknowledging that something was there a priori, nascent and naive as it seemed. Like, how to care for working elephants – a system of knowing that could only arise in a specific place and time at the adaptive hands of those in the muck. Looking at the lanky limbs of those leathery ladies and thinking, wtf?

Now, centuries later, the elephants suffer, scientific questions are banal, and we are unearthing a bitter root. We are psychologically and emotionally dissociated from life itself, having nurtured in our time only the lived experiences that can be documented and explained scientifically.

Look at the great ruse going on in healthcare right now. We are crowing about the scientific proof for creative practice, and quietly shadowing the mystery of it. We have pulled apart each of the senses in neuroscience, and are late to acknowledge the absurd faith it takes to care for human beings. These are practices that also require adherence, cultivation, and transmission to be successful over time.

That’s why so many of my huddles are in the kitchen. The work-from-home transition during the COVID crisis was an unusual moment of feminist home-court advantage. Suddenly, pets and children existed in the minds of managers. Our authentic selves appeared on screen and in the background. Science having the shits was fascinating to watch. Especially from the studio where we lose our shorts all the time.

For me, it was rough to be seen on screen so quickly. But, as I lost the daily dress up, I gained a greater sense of myself a priori. Before I knew to be this person in a suit, I was myself someone else. In my opinion, Foucauldian logic is extremist and fetishistic. Of course, we are something before we know. Self origins go back generations and are not the product of analysis. 

In other words, circus elephants came from the wild and are going to die in captivity whether we do the research or not. Their a priori existence matters, but it was untended all those years and still is quite muted. What could science do about it now? Even the evidence is gone. And, what hubris would ask?

The analytical error appears again. What if our search is not for the trackable? What if their needs are ephemeral or can’t be described in words? Like humans, maybe circus elephants need the amibguities of society – novelty, surprise, and delight – right alongside some genetic traces of the past. Maybe they are pale and lanky, of sorrow and boredom. Other scientific evidence shows that middle-aged American females (like me) need ground minerals, too. 

Knowing my own circus past – and the loop of such circular logics – I aim to study crocodile tears next.

Persistence and Payoff

When I hosted the first social studio in 2023, it was quite an experiment with few expectations. Toward the end, as moment built up, that changed. I wanted to deliver big.

Of course, I did. I’m a conscious capitalist, a proponent of the circular economy. I believe in progress for a purpose. Also, I was dearly wanting to move on from a recent prickly past. Haste, I have very few professional days left to waste!

Also, it was the end of a big deal.

I planned a 10-week online social studio, hosted it, and succeeded by my own hand and measure.

I experimented and failed at everything there was to do, at first. Then, much of it became rote and routine in a newly formed way.

No longer do I fear the weekly missive, for example. Lately, I like to write on my phone from a nearby park. After a short walk to sort my thoughts and find the story, I sit and touch tap my minor truths. Duck quacks are great applause.

The first ten essays I wrote in September 2023 were an excruciating cosmic childbirth tended by dueling doulas. Do it, or don’t. Now, writing each week is like feeding kittens.

Also, the social studio is excellent for quiet, parallel play. After a little chatter and a conversation, dense trust fills the air space on mute, even thousands of miles away.

I connected with past colleagues and met new ones. We deeply discussed familiar notions in creative practice, revealing more and more from the roots of ancient, common wisdom.

I completed last year (did I?)

I am creating the year ahead (am I not?)

It’s not so simple.

The book ahead of me delves into a past long before I existed, and only a faint version of that past at best. AI is revealing new historical evidence about my genealogy and DNA, alongside its unintended consequences.

Digging up the dead is forbidden in most cultures, and for good reason. Some leave us out on a windy mountainside to let vultures pick the bones. We endlessly wrestle with competing tomes.

The same creative tension lives in all the professions, including medicine and mental health. Long dead brain surgeons are buried with their ice picks. Ketamine dreams are revealed decades on. Closed cases openly weep for what’s inside.

Luckily, one lobotomized woman lives just below my ribcage on the left. Lacework from tiny papercuts, effects of a life swallowing knives. But somehow still alive in me and beating my blood to get out.

I know the book will release her, but it’s not fit for public just yet. One insight from the social studio–we still have to contend with the lonely unknowns. No amount of friendship or fostering (or an effing robot) will entirely alleviate the internal ache of being humane. That’s the work of writing and a patient readership.

When brutality is unearthed, swaddle it like a stillbirth and give it a proper goodbye. The book ahead of me is a quiet way to say goodnight to a granny I never knew and to reclaim the family between us over time.

Until the end of the year, I’ll take some time to write and publish here. Then new social studios will begin. Connect with me directly in the usual ways, especially if there’s no one else to call. For comfort, I will read you the terrifying stickies on my wall.