A creative at heart, I’ll be the first
to tell you I prefer the right hemisphere of my brain to the left. Like a
mother with a favorite child, I’ll not hide it. I confess. I do. The right, as
science tells us is known as that side from which we create. The left, as I understand
it, handles those opposite tasks required to exist in the material world:
things like balancing checkbooks, organizing your planner…you know, the "left brain/linear”
stuff.
I am blessed to have a life whereby I
get paid for creating, however, as is with all of nature, the yin and yang must
balance. When speaking on the subject of creativity, I remind folks that much
as we creatives long for someone else to do the heavy mental lifting of things
like…our books, our taxes, etc, truth be told, even a creative project is
nowhere without a left brain to assist in bringing a concept to fruition. Let’s
take for example, a new cookbook, designs for which are now on the drawing
board here in my own life. From the creative standpoint, nothing fires my
synapses like an idea coming through…(I’d love to take credit, but as I suspect
every creative senses, we didn’t do it; we’re only here to spot it, weigh it,
and get out of the way to allow the muse to do what muses do, but for the sake
of this example let me walk you through how it works.)
I’m out in the garden…or inside
cleaning dog bowls…in other words, I’m doing something mundane, which is why I
love ironing and washing dishes, but I digress…Creative ideas come between the
gaps of our linear thinking; trick is to grab ‘em when they appear and (my
approach anyway) write them down.
A spark hits: I reach for a scrap of
paper. (This is also my justification for why I leave so many scratch pads
lying around everywhere, and a cup full of pens on almost every surface.) I’ll
take down a thought; sketch an idea…and hopefully remember to put the paper in
the stack where the other ideas are mounting.
With enough of a theme to get me going
(the next cookbook for instance, is a gardening guide for growing the food,
THEN creating it in a dish, i.e. a garden to table proposition culminating in
ways to preserve the food left over, but again, I digress). Enough of these
ideas start swirling and I’ll meet with my team to start mocking up the
concept….But here is where the left half (linear) of brains enter in.
To meet with a team means I must
consult the checkbook. After all, these are artists too, likewise fighting
their own left brain resistance, but creatively open to working on something
larger than themselves, as a matter of getting to create. Bottom line:
checkbook checking is a left brain proposition. Do I have enough money right
now to start a new project?
Next up? A schedule for production,
which involves another set of cells stored in the left brain: the calendar, and
mapping… the timeframe.
With budgets and calendars lining up,
we toss in the third round of left brain elements…things like emailing,
calling…i.e. setting up meetings to begin laying out said production…which is,
again, all linear, all the time…(You’re starting to get the gist…)
On behalf of its right brain (creative)
kid sister, the left hemisphere jumps into action and takes over for a period,
after all, every book must have a page count, page dimensions (measurements for
which I MUST have someone good at math)…In short, the creative process is a
WHOLE brain proposition. So for as much as I’d like to abandon one hemisphere
of my brain and put it up for adoption, I kinda have to keep the thing so as to
protect its creative little sibling, the creative half.
I could go on and on with why left
brain linear can’t be neglected (things like bidding out print jobs, shipping and
distribution details, production schedules for delivery, etc…but again, I think
you get the picture).
But where this comes back to amuse is when
I have a task totally unrelated to a creative project. A real world task such
as tax preparation for example, which is where this blog started before I took
you down this creative roadmap to my head.
This week found me, as is often the
case for creatives, in need of a deadline in order to get my act together and
get out of floaty/creative land and back to the real world in order to do my
patriotic duty. My bookkeeper gently reminds me that “business taxes come
first” (something I swear I have a mental block for, which is why I have a
bookkeeper). To me, this means pulling out the shoebox of receipts and the
check registers and doing nothing more than tallying things with the help of a
calculator no less (I mean, it’s not like I’m adding all this up by hand).
Edging far too close to said deadline
for me to get things to her so that SHE can make the deadline, God graces me
with a snow day…One FULL day I had not counted on to complete this otherwise
mentally-torturing task. Hooray for small miracles, and what’s more-- I could
not have driven out my driveway had I wanted to. I mean, God’s never sent a
clearer signal.
In true ADD form, I head for the boxes,
and when I do, I notice all the other boxes in a basement I’ve been neglecting
for way too long by way of a Goodwill run, a yard sale or a torch. I’ll just
stack one or two, I decide, after all, it is a mess and maybe allowing my
thought processes a break before hunkering down will lend inspiration. Yeah.
That’s the ticket.
In a burst of SuperWoman drive and
ambition, why I tackle that basement with a frenzy…a white tornado of
organizational bliss, the likes of which I’ve been listening to self help books
to get my mind around for two weeks now. I set aside books for McKay’s;
knick-knacks for Goodwill; even leftover wood I bundle up to feed Thurman’s
woodburning stove (after all, it is snowing the day I do this, so he probably
will appreciate it).
It’s a pattern I’ve noticed for some
time. I have fellow writers who have it too. A new project is to commence and
an overwhelming urge to clean the desk (if not the whole house) overtakes.
Something requiring nothing more than a butt to a chair, and I’m on steroids to
get the laundry done.
I have no idea how this works by way of the wiring in my head, for
surely there are synapses jumping the great abyss between my two mental
hemispheres, but for reasons I shall never understand, but have finally come to
accept, when I need to get focused on numbers or something insisting I start
left brain first, get ready…cause something’s gonna get real tidy before the
task commences!
