Creative/Frightened Selves

Evelyn Rodriguez continues to impress me with the depth and breadth of her thinking. In this post she comments on her personal emotional reactions to Fast Company's piece on Teresa Amabile's Creativity Myths.

In the same post, Evelyn quotes a few lines from T.S. Eliot's play, The Elder Statesman:

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us.
And urge us on to futile activity,
and in the end, judge us still more severely;
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.
T.S. Eliot

This terrorizing, relentless self, the one who constantly drives us towards what a psychotherapy professor of mine once called the "insatiable 'more and more' of the voracious ego," the source of "maximizing," has become the modern-day Simon Legree; the internalized slave driver who continues to urge us on to the "futile activity" of thankless work.

Why? "To succeed."

Why? "To get more."

Why? "To live better."

Why? "So that others will admire and respect me."

Why? "So that I will admire and respect myself."

And then, another voice, the ego's silent partner, raises itself up and "judges us."

For what? For foresaking our selves.

What is the judgment? The judgment is for wasting our lives on the foolish and futile, rather than spending that precious time on those things that bring us back to ourselves most fully.

And then we remember: it is this center of ourselves, the deep reservoir to which we must turn to be, at one and the same time, creative, authentic and inspiring. I aspire to reach this place daily.

Thanks to Evelyn, David and Bruce Mau for reminding me of these never-complete lessons.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

Then there's this (I just noticed your comment on Hugh Macleod's Gaping Void, and you'll find the same poem posted in his comments section, but it seems so appropriate tonight)

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

- W.B. Yeats

[Connie Sartain]

Wow.

[Tom Guarriello]

Wow, indeed!