Lessons From a Four Year Old on Creativity

A couple years ago I was attending the high school graduation of a friend’s son. It was one of those lovely early June evenings in Western Massachusetts, where the sun lies low in the sky, stretching the long shadows of voluptuously green leafed maples across the lawns. We had gathered in the football field on folding metal chairs; slapping at the mosquitoes that hovered to feed on our bare ankles, waiting for the Class of 2010 to march onto the field to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance.

As we waited, I began to watch the little girl in the row in front of me.  She was about four years old, with her long blond hair in a ponytail, lose strands tucked behind her ears, and was wearing a cotton summer dress. Her parents had brought a stack of white paper to entertain her during the graduation. She was kneeling in the grass, using the seat of the metal folding chair as a table top. She had a sharp pencil in hand and she was drawing, completely oblivious to all the grownups that were shifting in their seats, looking around for friends to greet, saving seats, and keeping the general busy unrest we adults all exhibit prior to ceremonies such as these.

She was drawing with pure joy. Her little tongue would peek out in concentration as she put pencil to paper and would draw a beautiful woman, or a horse, or dog, or a house with the sun shining over top. She never paused in her drawing to consider whether a line might be off. Never stopped to erase and correct an image. She just drew, in one continuous fluid motion, assured, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her vision was perfection. She completed the drawing within minutes, if not seconds. Then she would stop, put down her pencil and hold the drawing up in front of herself to admire her creation. She would smile at the drawing, sigh in utter contentment, set the drawing on her mother’s lap and begin a new masterpiece on the next piece of blank paper in her pile.

When do we lose that, I pondered, in my metal folding chair behind her.  At what point do doubts begin to surface in our minds that what we create is not perfect? At what point do we first stop to consider that our lines might be off? When do we first lose that confidence and stop drawing to erase?  When do we begin to look at our efforts so critically, that we are afraid to even draw the line in the first place, and begin to believe that our efforts don’t measure up? At what point do we create an arbitrary image of what perfection is, in our own minds? Wouldn’t  it be wonderful if we could hang on to a bit of our inner four year old and maintain the confidence to create with abandon…..and not be afraid to wave it around, show it off, and sigh at it with utter contentment?

Life, Death, and Life.

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp, because dawn has come.” – Rabindranath Tagore

I had never been through the day to day of death before. People that I have known have died, certainly.  I have brought dinners to the families, been to the funerals, and sent condolence cards. But, I had never really attended death before.  I had never sat with it continuously, sat it out, until we all gathered to be with our father at the end.  Our father, the father of the beatniks, a man who was larger than life and whose personality had always transfixed everyone in his presence; a man who had never been quieted by anyone or anything, was quiet as he turned inward, floating for days somewhere between this life and the next.

It was a powerful and a humbling experience. There were moments which transcended time and space. Moments we could not explain other than with the idea that we were in the realm of miracles. It seemed as though time lost meaning as we gathered, waiting, and talking, reliving, reconnecting, and coaching each other and ourselves through the unknown process into some new reality that seemed vaguely illusive.

 It seemed to me that death was really the ultimate surrender. The days were long and warm, the most perfectly beautiful golden light and long shadows our location could bring. We sat on the lawn, day after day, life suspended, smelling the warm rose geraniums in the boxes outside the window where our father lay. My brother commenting that he imagined Dad was hearing our voices in his sleep, the murmured talk, the laughing, the clink of glasses…much like a child is aware of the adults talking as he drifts off to sleep, safe and loved in the room right beside everyone.

Dad was safe, cared for, and loved right in the room next us, as we sat in the setting sun outside his window. There, in those days, we adjusted to being the comforting presence ourselves, as opposed to the ones who had been comforted by the man himself. Then one night, as we slept, the fog slipped in, whispering long tendrils of cool vapor through the yard, deep and thick from the ocean. At the same time, Dad’s spirit slipped out of his body, and freed, swirled away from this life and off to some new unseen realm beyond our understanding.

It was not as I might have imagined it. Much like natural birth was not as I had imagined it. It was raw and earthy, absolutely humbling, intensely intimate, life affirming, clarifying, and it was surprisingly not as sad as I might have imagined. And much like natural childbirth, natural death, also leaves you mentally exhausted, completely awed by the processes of nature, and profoundly grateful.

We will miss our father tremendously. He has shaped each one of us in ways we are still discovering. But our father left us with the greatest gift a man could give; he left us each other.

Chapter Three