“Thinking Outside of The Box”

 

Creativity, Survival, and Situational Politics. 

Here’s a hypothetical – let’s say, the boss has asked you and a few other employees to stay late and help out, working off the books. A few hours later, he announces it’s time to go home – but then, he’s frantic – he’s lost his keys. He tells you the route he has taken, and asks you to help find those keys.

You carefully follow the path, looking for the missing keys. You follow an orderly, rational route, as someone of his stature would have taken. Perhaps, he stopped here, to inspect a supervisor’s workstation, for irregularities. No, they’re not there. At the end of the route, you’ve found nothing, certainly not the bosses’ keys. You retrace your path – still not there.

Did you miss them? What do you do next? Did he go someplace he forgot, or didn’t tell you? Or, is this a ruse, to test your loyalty and obedience? Does he know where the keys really are?

You ask if he could have gone any place else. He’s adamant, no.

You retrace the route once more, and still they haven’t magically appeared.

Is he really desperate to find those keys, or is this a test?

The task of obedience would be to retrace the path, again and again, looking for those keys.

Rational solutions would include scrutinizing places along the route where the keys might have fallen into a more obscure setting. Or, something might have absently been laid on top of them.

Still, no keys.

Expand the search radius, but in a respectful manner.

Nada.

Did he perhaps forget a small side trip?

Does he know where the keys really are?

Then, something occurs to you. In the past, you’ve noticed that dodgy, furtive glance he makes when he passes near the women’s restroom.

You find the keys in a stall, and can guess how they got there.

You tell your boss you found them where they had fallen into a shadow, next to the aforementioned supervisor’s workstation. We can all go home now.

Frequently, social survival is survival.

Sometimes, in order to think “outside the box,” one has to actually climb outside of it and look around.

And, sometimes, creativity is more exercised in the framing of a solution, than in its actual discovery.

Dream Hangover

Today was one of those rare days when several factors dovetailed – I didn’t have to be up early or go anywhere in a hurry, the weather was overcast and quiet and rainy, but not violent or threatening, and there was a pleasant feeling left over from my dreams. I woke up gracefully, and felt as if half of me were still connected to that inner landscape. At those times, one can shutter the left eye, and allow the right brain to dream on for a while.

Too often I awake quickly, snapping to the impinging responsibilities of life. While most are not actual demands or threats, our society has conditioned us to start our days on red alert. An austere envelope sporting the vague threat “OFFICIAL BUSINESS” turns out to be just another flier soliciting my business. Radio, television, junk mail, religious zealots at the front door, email, even the neighbor’s yappy mutt stridently demand attention.

There are those times when a nightmare is so intense, so real that it hovers over me all day, and the demands of the outside world are welcome to slap me out of the inner chaos and terror… but fortunately, those are few and far apart. You might think that someone who paints with a dark palate as I do would find nightmares a rich source of inspiration – I wish it were so, but that is very rarely the case for me. Dreams are often pointless, muddled, rife with anxiety; a redundant process-sort-file batch-job of memory, a vain attempt to impose order onto the randomly neurotic transactional quagmire of existence.

Yet, there also exists this wondrous place, where self-consciousness and hierarchies, pecking orders and politics, physics and boundaries and even the cage of the expected personality, all slip away, and everything becomes possible again. In the absence of alarm clocks and phones and knuckles on the door, this soap-bubble of synchronicity can linger near consciousness long enough to offer up possibility and poetry.

I wish for more of these days.