Recently a friend wrote on being consumed by a project. It must have felt satisfying and rewarding to not only persevere through the process, but also to have the awareness noticing the "distillation" occur.
Awareness.
Appreciating when it happens.
Arresting the thought processes long enough to allow it to happen.
Wu-wei
The fates guide those who will; those who won't they drag.
-Seneca
The associative aspect of his piece struck a chord with me. I have always wondered how my brain uses the stimuli I send in order to learn, choose, dream, live.
There is, moreover, one class of intuitions that consistently leads us astray—dangerously astray. These intuitions are stubbornly resistant to analysis, and it is exactly these intuitions that we shouldn't trust. Unfortunately, they are also the intuitions that we find the most compelling: mistaken intuitions about how our own minds work.
Read the rest here.
In teaching kids to write, I try to inspire them to be still long enough for these opportunities to be realized. It takes a while. Persistence pays. Creative work, after all, is still work.
One of my favorite innovators, Roger von Oech, suggests methods here.
As a father and as a teacher I have a responsibility to show kids the world and guide them through the process of making the decisions that influence their existence in the world.
Asking questions.
I teach.
I learn.
Associate.
Be aware of perception.
Try to understand.
Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers.
- Voltaire
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it -- walk.
- Ayn Rand
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
- Albert Einstein
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
- Plato
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
- Bertolt Brecht
Most people get it wrong.
- Russell Chatham
And my favorite ...
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.
- Rilke
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