Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Creating

13 Aha Moments in 2013

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In 2010 and 2012, I shared the magic moments when I heard or read something that surprised or inspired me. Moments that made me say, “aha.” As we say farewell to 2013, I have 13 more for you:

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health. – Michal Pollan

The next time you look in a mirror, think about this: In many ways you’re more microbe than human. There are 10 times more cells from microorganisms like bacteria and fungi in and on our bodies than there are human cells. – Rob Stein

You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.” – Judy Wicks

Since there is no “healthy soil/healthy microbe” label that can steer us toward these farms, my suggestion is to ask this simple question: “Does the farmer live on the farm?” Farmers who live on their land and feed their family from it tend to care for their soil as if it were another family member. – Daphne Miller

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.” – Janisse Ray

Thanks to cutting-edge science, we know that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement — giving us the competitive edge that I call the happiness advantage. – Shawn Achor

I melted, and accepted, and only then could I actually enjoy his presence instead of worrying about losing him or changing him. And this, as I’ve learned, is the best way to be. – Leo Babauta

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today. – Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham

The findings suggest that job burnout is “a stronger predictor of coronary heart disease than many other known risk factors, including blood lipid levels, physical activity, and smoking. – Anne Fisher

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking — something that precludes mindfulness altogether. When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general wellbeing suffers a palpable hit. – Maria Konnikova

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. … Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. – Peter Gray

The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive — even necessary — for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should be not to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play. –  Eric Toensmeier

Did you hear or read something in 2013 that surprised or inspired you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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5 Ways to Rev Up Your Creativity

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“I’m going to make something every day this year,” I announced in December.

When I saw my friends’ responses, I thought perhaps this might be too ambitious an undertaking. However, I’ve really just decided to turn more of my attention to creativity this year.

Why? Well, when I peek back through the years and squint at the more unhappy periods of my life, I detect a common thread: I wasn’t creating much of anything. Maybe I was working overtime at a day job. Maybe I was in a season of editing instead of writing. Maybe I was just uninspired. But a dearth of creativity and a general malaise seem to go together. Which causes which? I’m not sure. But I know that when I’m working on a creative project, I feel more alive.

I know I’m not alone. Matthew Crawford, author of The Case for Working With Your Hands traded his job in a Washington think tank for a career fixing motorcycles, because “knowledge work” made him feel tired and useless. “Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day,” Crawford writes. I think we can all relate to that thrill of making or fixing something with our own hands.

In her book Lifting Depression, Dr. Kelly Lambert explains what might cause the burst of happiness creating gives us: “When we knit a sweater, prepare a meal, or simply repair a lamp, we’re actually bathing our brain in ‘feel-good’ chemicals.”

So this year I’m making things.

I’m off to a great start. In the last month, I’ve knitted half of a scarf out of bamboo silk, made kombucha and St. John’s Wort oil for the first time, wrote a handful of poems, brainstormed a new novel, and churned out quite a few drawings. Mostly I’ve had a lot of fun. But I’ve also remembered what makes creativity hard: there’s often a lot of groping around, stumbling, and failing involved.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

5 Ways to Rev Up Your Creativity

Perhaps you’d like to join me in paying more attention to creativity this year? If so, here are five things experts say can help stoke our creative fires:

  • Spend time in nature

A University of Kansas study of a team of hikers found that a four-day backpacking trip boosted the participants’ creativity by 50 percent. You might need to leave your electronic devices in your backpack to reap the benefits. Ruth Ann Atchley, the researcher who conducted the study, suggested the results may have been due to turning off the distractions of modern life as much as the natural setting.

  • Embrace boredom

Researchers at the University of Central Lancashire in Great Britain found that boring jobs encourage creativity. It turns out performing dull tasks lets us to detach from our surroundings and daydream. So committing to creativity might mean committing to some mental downtime.

  • Focus on the process instead of the results (or just dance)

“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free,” the poet Rumi wrote. In an interview, artist Dana Lynne Andersen said that one of the biggest mistakes beginners make when sitting down to paint is focusing on the end product. To get her students focused instead on the process of being creative, she encourages them to dance. That makes sense, since dancing is a creative process with no real end product. It may be worth a try, and as Rumi points out, there’s really no reason not to dance.

  •   Learn from kids

One afternoon I watched a soccer coach force a group of elementary-aged kids to run laps around the track. They looked like deflated balloons as they trudged along, and it occurred to me that kids should really be coaching us on joyful, exuberant outdoor play. Similarly, young kids are experts in creativity. In a famous 1968 study, George Land found that 98 percent of three- to five-year-olds showed genius levels of creativity on a test developed by NASA. By the time the kids were 15, only 12 percent exhibited divergent thinking. And when the test was given to thousands of 25-year-olds, only two percent showed divergent thinking. So what makes kids such creative geniuses? They ask lots of questions. They marvel at things. They find any excuse to play. It’s a model worth studying.

  • Commit to practicing

All humans are creative. But a lot of us don’t commit to creative work, and perhaps the biggest reason  is that it forces us to confront our own mediocrity. We likely will never compare to the best artists, musicians, novelists, designers, and even home-brewers of the world. Of course, the one way we’ll get better is practice, and Ira Glass offers some wise words about recognizing your creative work sucks and doing it anyway:

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. … You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Here’s to creativity!

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about creativity:

What are you creating? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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12 Aha Moments in 2012

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At the end of 2010, I shared 10 magic moments when someone said or wrote something that surprised or inspired me. Moments that made me say, “aha.” Now, as we say so long to 2012, I have 12 more for you:

I unsubscribed from the clock. Dropped my watch right into the garbage. Shut off the glowing green-blue digital clocks that seem to piggyback on every appliance known to man – microwave, stove, VCR. … I’m less stressed. I don’t worry about how long things take or even bother considering how long they should take. … I’m no longer chained to the clock. I measure my life in heartbeats and years, the only significant units to me. – Steven Corona, Living Without Time

Plants, it turns out, possess a sensory vocabulary far wider than our perception of them as static, near-inanimate objects might suggest: They can smell their own fruits’ ripeness, distinguish between different touches, tell up from down, and retain information about past events; they “see” when you’re approaching them and even “know” whether you’re wearing a red or blue shirt; like us, they have unique genes that detect light and darkness to wind up their internal clock. – Maria Popova, What a Plant Knows

Micro-publishing means that every person is a publisher. It takes away the whole idea of “us” vs. “them” that comes part and parcel with indie publishing and establishes that there is only Us, all of the people in the world, and we are all publishers. – Christina Katz, “What is What Is Micro-Publishing? A Thorough Definition By Christina Katz”

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. – Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,” New York Times

Pushing our children toward adulthood takes us (and them) away from seeing that each of us are whole people exactly as we are. A baby is not an unformed child, a child is not an ungrown adult, an elder is not an age-ruined version of a once younger self. … We don’t have to paddle away from the moment we live in toward some ideal age. Doing so doesn’t just wish away right now, it also condemns every other age we live in to be something less. – Laura Grace Weldon, What’s the Perfect Age?

Focus on your masterpiece. Whatever you focus on, you’ll create. Think your project is crappy? Then it will be crappy. Think you’ll get it done no matter the odds? Then you’ll finish it even if you get hit by a bus. – Joshua Fields Millburn, Create Your Masterpiece, a 16-Step Guide

So began my year of living the shareable life, which I chronicled on shareable.net. … I hadn’t thought my blog would make a difference, but I was wrong. My story was picked up by Fast Company, Sunset, and NBC Nightly News, reaching tens of millions of people with the message that sharing is both good for the soul and a savvy financial move. At the end of the day, I reaped the personal reward of sharing with my neighbors. And I have an extra $17,000 in my pocket. – Neal Gorenflo, How I saved $17,000 in one year by sharing

I remember hearing about a book called “How to Parent without Bribes, Threats and Punishments,” and I laughed because those were all my discipline tools, and I believed in them. But, 2 years later, I’m orbiting a more peaceful planet and making an occasional smooth landing.  … I still value compliance, but not the kind that comes from threats or promise of a reward, because in the long run, I want my children to be motivated to make choices from their intrinsic desire to add to the peace and harmony of our family (and the planet). – Rachel Turiel, orbiting a more peaceful planet

I learned a little trick while practicing meditation that helped me, not only with meditation, but with just about everything I do. I noticed I was reluctant to start the meditation, and paused to wonder why that is. What I noticed was a kind of tightness, in my chest and shoulders and neck, but also in my mind. … I chose to let go of the tightness. – Leo Babauta, The Little Trick to Make Any Moment Better

What if we stopped labeling our children, criticizing our children, fretting over our children, and instead just loved them unconditionally and let them be themselves? I have a theory about this: If we stop trying to change and mold our children and start loving them just the way they are then we have to extend the same courtesy to ourselves. – Jennifer Margulis, Mismatched: When Your Child’s Personality Clashes With Your Own

I looked in the other pocket. I looked in my bag. And then I remembered, with dull thud to the gut—I changed trousers before leaving my room. The Fitbit was back at the hotel, clipped to my jeans, motionless, recording nothing. … Part of me wanted to cab it back to the hotel. Cab it back and clip on the Fitbit and do the walk again. … Smiling, I looked out over a Paris glowing golden—caught in a long summer twilight—and enjoyed the day for what it was: a beautiful walk, existing only in my mind, to be forgotten, unrecorded and fleeting, just as it’s always been.” – Craig Mod, Paris and the Data Mind

Our children don’t need us to play with them all the time. It only seems like that because we keep running away from them. … Child development experts say preschoolers need one hour of undistracted play with a parent each day. … But this means one hour when you sit on the floor and don’t get up. You don’t leave to fold the laundry or start supper. You don’t abandon the game to do something more interesting or important. You don’t check your email or fiddle on your phone. And the game is one they choose, not something you think is worthwhile or educational for them.” – Karen Maezen Miller, momma time

 

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