why not just say it with words?

and…

the purpose of practice

Chris Corrigan blogged and I doodled.

The work of Chris Corrigan and the Art of Hosting apparently share much with my pet projects: Slow Learning, The Hedonist’s Challenge and Liberation Movement.  The common threads?

• How we pay attention changes things
• Deep listening (and tasting, and feeling, and seeing, smelling, and touching, and moving) is a practice worth doing just because.
• There’s no higher goal for learning than to learn.
• There’s no other purpose for feeling good other than to feel good.
• When we move freely, we’re already there.
• We’re better together when we can be with ourselves.
• We’re better together.

julia butterfly hill speaks about purpose

Sketch notes from last night’s gathering at OISE with celebrity tree climber and esteemed activist Julia Butterfly Hill.

slow learning about slow food

Carlo Petrini tells stories of power, greed, conviviality and reciprocity to a group of UC Berkeley students who apparently know little of Leonardo da Vinci. (It’s okay. They have time to learn.)

I was reading more about Carlo Petrini, and watching his lectures in service to another project of mine: The Hedonists Challenge.  Sometimes it’s not easy to see the connections among everything I follow, so finding Petrini again is reminding me that my slow learning projects do converge.

enjoy the satisfaction only a guillotine can provide

On a chilly Friday afternoon, Kaia and I made art cards as a Slow Learning project.

The intention: Take something precious, like a painting or a drawing you’ve made, and chop it to pieces.

Our process:

1. Create a painting on card stock. (Better yet, find a drawing or painting that you once thought was something special.)

2. Take the painting to my favorite art tool: the almighty guillotine-style paper cutter.  Turn the card image-side down (you want to be surprised later) and prepare to chop to a uniform dimension (I like trading card dimension, 2 1/2″ by 3 1/2″ because they fit so nicely in the little plastic sleeves you can buy at hobby stores)

3. Execute.

4. Try not to cut your fingers off. (The next step is much harder if you do.)

5. Turn the cards over and see the beauty that emerges.

I’m always taken by how clever the compositions of my new-found paintings are when I chop them up at random.

Kaia pointed out that the framing of the trees outside by the windows reminded him of the framing made by the paper cutter.

Framing, it seems, is everything.

What do we do with our cards now?  Read about my card obsession in an earlier post.

rainbow of desire workshop with branch out theatre

from my sketchbook, visual notes after class

click on image to enlarge

More about the work of Augusto Boal. More on the work of Naomi Tessler at Branch Out Theatre.

WorkPain: A New Vision for the New Age

Remember the dawn of the new Millennium?  Remember that innocent time, years and years ago at the turn of the century when a new world dawned and new possibilities for new enterprises seemed possible? Back then, Pat Kambitsch was reinventing herself all over again, and so emerged her website and a business designed to connect ordinary people with participation in the arts. (You can still see the archives from that distant time.)

Kambitsch thought too many people put in too many hours working at  tedious tasks that resulted in little good. She figured we’d all be happier (and maybe even more effective) if we just played around every now and then. And so, Pat Kambitsch conceived and gave birth to a Bill of Rights for Players and Thinkers.

Bill of Rights

for

Players and Thinkers

1. You have the right to play–participate, recreate, fool around, dabble, doodle, explore, perform, have fun, show off.

2. You have the right to think– imagine, ruminate, muse, dream, conjure, tinker, invent, pretend, reflect.

3. You have the right to take risks.

4. Playing and thinking take time. You shall feel no guilt or shame for taking time for this important work.

5. The elite shall not exclude you. Art is active, participatory, inclusive. You have the right to join in.

6. Tortoises, late bloomers, and ugly ducklings take heart. The best learning is often slow:  begin any time and take as much time as you need.

7. You have the right to play around, to explore playgrounds near and far, and to share your toys with many different playmates.

8. Your freedom to show outrage and to make noise shall not be infringed.  You have something to say.  Be loud and be heard. Be bold and be seen.

9. You have the right to make mistakes.

10. You may play with toys of others. Mix up media, blend and bend genres, transplant ideas, and cross-pollinate inspiration.

11. You have the right to play with yourself, to spend time alone, to explore your own gifts. No one can play with you like you can.

12. You have the right to assemble peacefully with other players and thinkers and to thrive within the support of a nurturing and challenging community.

Pretty groovy, huh? Lots of people at the time thought so.

Kambitsch and others soon learned, however, that those in possession of money do not value play any more than they value work without pay. Unless, of course, that play hurts a little. Successful people, it appears, like to participate in fluffy extracurriculars as long as they offer a bit of conspicuous suffering along the way.
Now, years later, armed with the wisdom only hindsight can afford, Kambitsch set out to recreate a new vision and mission for her work. So in order to create something that might be worth her while, Kambitsch is now considering a new paradigm for a new enterprise: WORKPAIN.

And so here are WorkPain’s  Thirteen Commandments for Work and Suffering (or the Bill of Wrongs)

1. Thou shalt work every moment every day of your life as hard as you can as long as you can. No need to worry about the availability of work, for there is always work to do. With enough mindfulness training, breathing itself becomes a laborious task.
2. Thou shalt spend money. Spending money feeds the virtuous cycle.  The more money you spend the more you must work to pay for your spending and the more money you will make.
3. Thou shalt multitask as much as is humanly possible.  Your place in heaven depends on how much you get done here on earth. Just remember to focus while you’re at it.
4. Thou shalt not work for free. Thou shalt make money at thy toils.  The quality of your work shall be measured by the amount of money you make. As the Beatles once sang, “And in the end, the love you make, is equal to the money you take.”
5. Thou shalt not make creative playthings of your office supplies.
6. Thou shalt not make anything that you might otherwise buy at the store, lest you fall prey to the treacherous trap of sloppy creativity which leads to scientific discovery and artistic exploration which never pays off in the end.
7. Thou shalt suffer while thou works. Work is difficult and painful, long periods of boredom punctuataed by bursts of terror. If you’re not suffering, then you’re not working.
8. Thou shalt look like thou is working even when thou is not. Take a clipboard into the bathroom if you must, but never ever ever stop working.
9. Thou shalt remain lucid while dreaming so that thou might work while you sleep.
10. Thou shalt not be spontaneous. Thou shalt plan every moment of every day and use checklists and with little boxes and such.
11. Thou shalt not be curious. Thou shalt focus. Think freely and you won’t get paid.
12. Thou shalt become expert in one thing and one thing only. Work is a jealous God that doesn’t like it when your imagination wanders.
13. Thou shalt practice WorkPain commandments while working with children so that the next generation will continue to suffer as you have suffered and so that as a race of human beings we might achieve all that we might possibly achieve.

It’s all in the cards

Slow learning sometimes gets ugly.

As I dig into a project, I often lose my way. Thoughts meander, new inspirations distract, themes overlap and diverge, metaphors expand and collide. Old wayward ideas have lusty affairs with hot young ideas. Best intentions reproduce, argue, cheat on past commitments, align with other inspirations and have messy seconds with other thoughts from other thinkers. My own thoughts battle with my own ideas.

Like any slow learner, it’s easy for me to get lost in my own learning.

I’ve found a cheap and effective power tool to help me find my way back.

I started using cards to organize thoughts about ten years ago while editing my meandering memoir, Looks Like Howard. I had written a lovely mass of loosely tangled vignettes. From this mess, I wanted to interweave a number of themes and nonlinear timelines into a narrative that would make sense. To do this, I used cards.

I distilled each story, theme, and idea to a single word or phrase that I wrote on a card. Then, I shuffled the cards around in about a thousand different ways until I found a sequence that would tell the story I wanted to tell. Without the cards, I don’t think I would have ever completed the project.

I soon found that cards are more than a tool for organizing writing. Cards can be magic.

I’ve used cards to

• Collect bits of thought and information
•  Ask interview questions (interviewees are given a card with one word topic printed on each card, and they choose which they’d like to talk about)
• Organize thoughts and bits of information
• Give as business cards
• Inspire improvised movement
• Trade as a collaborative cultural performance: Artist trading cards
• Transform ordinary to-do lists and reminders to something inspirational
• Tell me what to do next

Why Cards?  Why not something else? Unlike digital screen images, or –heaven forbid–sticky notes, handmade cards become a durable, physical, tangible artifact. I can hold them in my hand, put them in my pocket, shuffle them, lay them out, give them away.

I play with various plans and structures and maps. Sure, I could do this on the computer, but with the cards somehow it’s more fun.

When I make my own cards, I find the small format forces me to distill information, inspiration, and ideas to their essence. Plus I get to play with art supplies.

Who else is using cards?

Everybody, it seems. To list a few:

Dave Gray and his people at XPlane

Maya Design

Howard Gardner and Friends: the GoodWork Toolkit

Value Sensitive Design Research Lab

Tom Atlee and the Group Pattern Language Project

Centre for Nonviolent Communication

And then, everybody and her sister seems to be making her own goddessy tarot deck or something like it for divination and fortune telling.

The point is, the cards are so powerful,  I’d like to share my process of creating a personal deck for your slow learning journey with you.

And so, I’m offering this workshop,

It’s All in the Cards

 A session of  convivial art-making as we share the stories of our learning.

Why: to create a personal deck as a tool for use in planning for slow learning.

Where: My home studio in Liberty Village, Toronto

What to bring: I will be sharing my art supplies.
You can bring collage materials, paper artifacts to include in collages,
Your favorite art supplies if you don’t want to use my cheap ones.

When: By appointment. Expect to spend at least 3 hours.

If interested in attending this workshop, or for more information contact Patricia at Kambitsch dot com.

Haunted by the Zeigarnik Effect

Bluma Zeigarnk sitting at her desk. (Looks like she's disappointed in you. Was it something you did? Knowing you, it's probably something you left undone.)

When I first heard about the Zeigarnik Effect, it was an accident. I was browsing the Internet looking for some silly fact or other when I saw the words, “Zeigarnik Effect.”  Hmmm. That looks interesting, I thought, but then I soon returned to my mindless browsing.

While I was wading through the wastelands of the World Wide Web, checking in on Facebook, and Googling myself, I began feeling  troubled and anxious. Something just wasn’t right. I wondered: What is the Zeigarnik Effect? Who was this Zeigarnik person? I must find out.

The suspense of not knowing the answers about this mysterious Zeigarnik nagged at me so much that I looked her up. Turns out Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian experimental psychologist who was interested in helping people to increase effectiveness in their work. So she did a bit of experimenting with people and asked them about their anxieties and worries about finishing things.

Zeigarnik’s work suggests that people remember what is incomplete or unfinished better than something that is all wrapped up nice and neat.  By nature, it seems, humans yearn to finish things. That’s why hearing part of a familiar song will leave you wanting to remember the rest of lyrics, and why the cliff hanger device used in a TV series is so effective.

Here’s how you can get the pesky Zeirgarnik Effect to work for you.

1. Start something and don’t finish it.  Go ahead, let your inner Zeigarnikian pester and heckle you .  Eventually you will complete the project, but not until you allow the incompletion of it mellow, ferment, froth, and bubble and fill you with dissatisfaction that turns into disgust that turns into desire to just get it over with. All the pent up frustration and desire will thrust and burst you forward into greater achievement and higher levels of accomplishment.

2. Break up your workday with moments whereby you do things other than work. When you are studying or writing or working on something that you want to remember later, resist the urge to work on it until you are done. The Zeigarnik Effect predicts that you will remember more if you give your brain a little incompletely digested grist for its mill, cud for its gut.  So, study until you almost have it, then go out and go for a walk, do some yoga, watch another episode of Battlestar Galactica, reorganize your seed catalogues, make a Marmite sandwich. Oh, heck, just go outside and play. Your brain will love you for it.

3. And when  you are trying to get someone to fall in love with you, make sure you leave a little information missing from time to time. As my dear Grandma, Elizabeth Kronenberger, said of spouses: “They don’t need to know everything.” I used to think that meant that it was okay to be deceitful, but now I realize it was simply her clever way of keeping relationships fresh and Grandpa interested.
4. And then, at long last, when you grow tired of that special someone and it’s not them, it’s you, and you’re ready to move on to greener pastures and you want to do other things and people, and they’re just not getting that it’s time to move on, you can do this: You can start to sing an obnoxious song, one they know well, say for example:

“And he will raise you up

On Eagles Wings

Bear you on the breath of Dawn

Make you to ….”

And then stop. Go no further. Soon the song will be implanted firmly in your former loved one’s unwitting head and the Zeigarnik Effect will begin to work its magic. His or her brains will be tormented by trying to remember and complete the rest of the obnoxious song.  Alas, he or she will not be able to get that damned song out of  his or her brains. Do this repeatedly, if not continually, until the brains of the object of your disaffection associates YOU with the obnoxious song.  Soon you will be free from this person forever, free to move on and plant your seed in the hills of those proverbial greener pastures.

clown summit

Doodle notes from an interview with Sue Morrison about Clown through Mask posted at the Clown Summit.

I’m always so amazed when someone is able to wrap words around a profound experience that seems beyond words. But then, Sue Morrison is gifted in speaking to slow learners like me.

Here’s a taste of the interview.