Pond Depression

Secrets of the Creative Brain - The Atlantic:

As of today it is two full weeks since my last productive day working on the pond. I've got in some very minor tweaking a few days, but no major progress. Thankfully last Saturday WAS a very nice day, but we are at Mindy's Miles in IA, a much better use of time.

Rain has been a constant companion -- the garden is muddy, the lawn is long, and sitting out on the deck watching my salmon smoke a bit is steamy. The prediction is that this rain pattern will end tomorrow with a high of 67 and I have my fingers and toes crossed! I'm very very sick of humid, cloudy, rainy weather!

The linked article on creativity is quite interesting to me relative to how the brain works. I'm certainly not in the "high creativity class", but there are aspects in there that still strike a nerve (or neuron)-- having thought about and visualized the pond / stream setup for years and now being mired in the real world mess phase of DOING with the constant rain, I was especially struck by:

In the R&D business, we kind of lump people into two categories: inventors and engineers. The inventor is the kite kind of person. They have a zillion ideas and they come up with great first prototypes. But generally an inventor … is not a tidy person. He sees the big picture and … [is] constantly lashing something together that doesn’t really work. And then the engineers are the strings, the craftsmen [who pick out a good idea] and make it really practical. So, one is about a good idea, the other is about … making it practical.

It is a range of course, but I am not a "tidy person" and I certainly have my share of "jury rigged" and "half baked" projects and ideas.

I was completely unaware of The Writers Workshop at University of IA and especially the relationship with Kurt Vonnegut! The article also covers the sad relationship between creativity and depression, bi-polar, substance abuse, etc ... the "demons" behind the "daemon" that are all too well known in the world of creativity.

Little bit on the academic side, but I enjoyed it.

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