Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

[Albert Einstein]

I’m not trying to call anyone out on mediocrity of the mind here. I’ve just been thinking about how easy it is to pursue mediocrity if we don’t ask what’s possible. If we don’t open the door to other possibilities.

I came upon that Einstein quote when I was looking for articles about the connection between mental illness and genius. I was looking for such information after my partner pointed me to this article in the Independent: “You don’t have to be bipolar to be a genius — but it helps.” The article is about a big study that showed people with top grades in school were four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder than people with average grades. They note that the link was strongest among people who studied literature or music.

The article includes this quote:

Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…

[Edgar Allan Poe]

All this got me thinking about the things we dismiss or reject because they don’t fit inside our perception of how things work. Maybe we dismiss someone as “living on another planet” because their ideas seem to have no grounding whatsoever in the reality we know. Or maybe we dismiss someone as being “over-the-top” because their views seem so extreme in contrast with those we normally encounter. We dismiss, we reject, but do we stop to think: what if it’s possible? What if they see something I don’t see?

Most revolutionaries are probably pretty bad at getting in quality family time. Some of the most admirable entrepreneurs took an idea that sounded ridiculous to most of their peers, and they worked “unreasonably” hard to make it happen. “Crazy people” see things we don’t see. And maybe the Things We Don’t See are immensely valuable and eye-opening, rather than delusional.

Generally, different makes people uncomfortable. If you’re striving for a challenging goal, people will probably feel uncomfortable about it. Maybe they’ll try to play it down in case of failure — trying to protect you. Or maybe they’ll dismiss it, waiting for you to wind yourself back down into the realm of acceptable goals — “get a real job” and all that.

Yesterday I was sitting on my motorbike at a big intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman wearing a jumble of bright colors and mysterious bags, standing on the grass. When I looked over, she broke into a goofy smile and motioned urgently at something to her left. Seeing nothing of particular interest, despite her frenzied gestures, I dismissed her as crazy. The light turned green, and I drove ahead; but I felt slightly unsettled. What did she want me to see? What would she have told me if I had gone to speak with her?

Who knows, but it’s just a thought.

a temple in Chiang Dao, Thailand

I had a dentist appointment today for my yearly cleaning. I went to a new dentist, and I went with pretty neutral expectations — after all, despite having never had a cavity, I’ve never found a dental cleaning to be a particularly uplifting experience (although I quite enjoyed getting a little plastic doohickey out of the “treasure chest” at my childhood dentist).

So, I walked into the dentist room with my neutral expectations, and from the very first moment, the dentist was really nice. I felt like I knew her already. She made me laugh when she was asking me “background” questions (and I mean genuinely laugh, not laughing-awkwardly-because-my-dentist-made-a-lame-dental-joke kinda laughing). She told me what she was going to do, and she told me what she expected. AND she didn’t make me feel guilty when I admitted to not flossing. When she asked me a question during the cleaning, she politely took the tools out of my mouth to give me the dignity of responding without grunting and drooling.

Now, not one of these things is particularly earth-shattering. In fact, they simply reflect the qualities of being nice and being polite — qualities, incidentally, which sound so bo-ring. But when we’re communicating with people (as we often do), it’s risky to underestimate the importance of delivery. Our initial chit-chat set the tone for the entire tooth-cleaning process, and made it that much easier for me to think it was the best dental cleaning I’d ever had.

You may have the best intentions in the world, but if your communication style is off, a lot of people will simply switch off. You might be excused if what you have to say is exceedingly funny or completely brilliant, but if you don’t make people feel good — whether that’s inspired, excited, warm and fuzzy, or loved — you just won’t stick.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

(Maya Angelou says it best).

If the dentist was able to turn my neutral mood into a happy one, I think the possibilities are quite open with this one.

First glance, enchanted forest?

Second glance, rubber plantation.

Third glance?

Do you remember the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami?

I have spent the past 10 days in Meulaboh, a small town in the Indonesian province of Aceh. Five years post-tsunami, I’ve come here to work on a multimedia project with my boyfriend, James, who came here as a photojournalist one week after the 2004 tsunami. Meulaboh was devastated by the tsunami — an estimated 40,000 people were killed, in a town with less than 150,000 (these numbers are rough, as it is difficult to find firm figures).

We’ve come here to visit a few people James met and photographed one week post-tsunami, and then again in late 2005. We have spent time speaking with them, interviewing them, and photographing them in the hopes of understanding how life moves forward after losing so much — family, friends, houses, jobs. What changes in daily life? What changes in your heart?

We’ve also documented Meulaboh as a town. I find that physically, the town seems to reflect the community’s progress in attempting to heal, or recover to a certain degree. The streets are alive with coffee shops, motorbikes, wandering goats, and kids riding bikes. Many small houses and shops have been rebuilt. But the skeletons of half-destroyed houses remain here and there, and much of the land near the ocean is no longer suitable for housing. The people are friendly and open, but the memories of the tsunami remain close to the surface.

There are scenes like this:

(Meulaboh fashion show)

…and scenes like this:

The contrasts are telling, but I think they are also inevitable.

I will let you all know when the audio-visual slideshow is completed, so you can hear and see the stories.

photo by Orin Zebest

I wrote the post below one week ago, but the delay in publishing is due to limited internet and a laptop that refuses to turn on…

I am sprawled across a bed inside a bungalow, with rain pummeling the roof until about 12 seconds ago. It is now silent, though the blue-black sky still flashes here and there.

Like the rain patterns, I have ebbed and flowed continuously over the past two months — between calm content, floods of exhilaration, and the crush of overwhelm. I am immersed in working on an oral history book project, focused on people’s life stories in the context of a regional social justice issue. This involves extensive interviews, the sort that last three to five hours. I have fallen in love with the interview process, as I’ve described in a previous post — the unfolding of a narrative, the challenging questions it raises for both the interviewee and me. It is intense, and I feel my body filling up — not only with these stories of hardship and persecution, but also with the delicate dynamics remembered and recounted in the interviews. I wish I could say my mind is only engaged in the stories, but there are decidedly less exciting aspects of the project, such as budgeting and logistics, which create a perpetual stream of to-dos. Hence, the risk of overwhelm.

I feel caught in an awkward position; one in which I feel that these stories have become part of my reality, yet I am also well aware that I have the luxury of slipping back into my privileged lifestyle (mobility, education, relative economic security) at will. This highlights a question that is always lingering somewhere in my mind (and on this blog): what defines our realities?

Oral history raises this question in my mind in a broad sense, as it focuses so deeply on individual experience and memory. I believe this is what makes oral history most powerful, and most vulnerable — it is, after all, our subjectivity that makes us most human. Oral history is an accessible medium for sharing our humanness, because once we are telling stories, it is what is evoked that becomes most important — not facts and dates.

Although I sometimes fear that I idealize the power of stories, I can comfort myself in remembering that I’m not pushing anything new here; rather, I’m adding my voice to centuries of belief in the art of storytelling. Although hearing the life story of an ex-child soldier in Sudan would undoubtedly give life to the vast differences in your experiences, I believe that the space created by storytelling also allows a unique connection to arise. It is not only our differences that define this space, but also the shared inherent subjectivity that defines us all.

But to what extent are we capable of setting aside our own contexts in order to fully absorb that of another person? While doing these oral history interviews, my colleagues and I are supposedly approaching the interviewees with no agenda, allowing them to dictate the direction of the story completely. And though that is what happens to a certain degree, there is the ever-present bottom line, which is that everyone is aware that we are doing these interviews for a book centered on human rights issues. We are doing these interviews for a book whose chapters will eventually have to fit the Western style of linear narrative.

No matter how hard we try in any interaction, there will always be invisible — or not so invisible — barriers to complete comprehension. Not only culture to culture, but person to person. Will you ever understand exactly how your brother felt after losing his job? Do you even fully understand why the ocean makes you feel overwhelmed? But again, isn’t this not-knowing simply the beauty and the difficulty of subjectivity — of the diversity of humanity? If I’ll never ever fully comprehend myself, and if my own realities will always be entwined with those of others, I believe in remaining constantly open to the beautiful tangle of humanness…

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this stream of thoughts I’ve laid out for you…

photo by mbgrigby

This blog has sat here in relative silence for the month of September, a silence that was largely prompted by a difficult time my family went through while I was visiting. I was lucky to be with my entire family during that period, and I found myself in a surreal headspace where thoughts became difficult to transfer to paper (or screen); it felt more natural to allow these thoughts the time to unfurl and grow within.

We have the absolute of the private life, the inner life so deep even we have trouble grasping it.

Then there is the private life of thoughts, the thoughts too bare, too loving, too divisive, too politically incorrect.

We have next the private life lived outside, but alone — morning bathroom rituals, a journal penned, songs belted out in a car.

This shares a blurry boundary with the private life shared, whether with one person or two: opinions admitted, feelings confessed, love made, and a laugh shared quietly in public.

… and on, and on …

I could of course go on describing, but what really interests me is what happens when the spaces on the spectrum overlap and jumble. What happens when you secretly read the journal of another, or when the diaries of a renowned writer are published after her death? What happens when feelings confessed to one person are revealed to another? And it doesn’t always need to be negative jumbles resulting in betrayal or deception — there is the woman blogging about her most vulnerable self for all the internet to see; the man speaking his most private poetry out in the street, because he just can’t bear to hold it in.

When do we draw these lines? What triggers overlap and jumble? I think technology will come to mind for many of us as a trigger, as social media has pulled much of the private life to be shared with not just one person or two, but hundreds, or even thousands. The private life may be idle thoughts that five years ago, may have been kept inside — or it may be an account of a scandalous affair. But what else?

I’m curious to know your take on these shifts… are there both positive and negative effects? What’s your experience?

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photo by hiddedevries

It seems that most of us have a deeply ingrained acceptance of the value of storytelling. When we meet an old friend for coffee to catch up, for example, we use old stories to cement connections and new stories to build identities. If you’re a small business owner, surely you’ve heard the cries to use storytelling in your marketing. If you’re in the nonprofit world, you’re likely tired already of being lectured that no one will support your cause unless you’re telling the story well.

But for all this chatter about stories, how many of us actually consider ourselves storytellers? How often do you consider your channels of narration and your audience? How often do you explore the implications of each story?

I spent last week working with a dear friend who I’m lucky enough to collaborate with on various projects. We were working on a sensitive project, interviewing people from Burma. I’ve always loved the process of interviewing, but doing three- to four-hour sessions of oral history interviews brought my love and respect for the form to a whole new level. Imagine the story as a well-worn blanket, tossed across the floor in a heap. These interviews were like the delicate process of unfolding each tangle, smoothing out each crease. The stories were intense and captivating, and the process of hearing and helping the story unfold was fascinating. I can’t give more details on the project at this moment, but I’ll let you all know when I’m able to discuss more.

Along these lines, here are a few questions that have been swimming around my mind these days … I’ve written some brief thoughts on each one, and I’d love to see you contemplate them in the comments section too:

• Where are you telling stories — what channels are you using? Why?

With the people closest to me, I maintain an open, ongoing narration that weaves the internal in with the external. These conversations feel essential to our relationships, and the process of speaking these stories is a crucial step in processing them. I tell a lot of stories on this blog too — again, a means of connecting and processing. My pen-and-paper is another channel that I’ve recently decided to revive — not my notebooks, though I use those every day, but my bedside journal for fleshed-out contemplation. Every time I put together a photo album on Facebook, I’m building a story of how my life is these days. I’m trying to be more conscious of this as I’m wading the waters of multimedia, looking for meaningful ways to tell stories.

• How often do you allow someone to really tell you their story? I mean, really gracing that person with your full attention and a desire to absorb their story.

Sometimes I become hyper-aware of how much we can drift in and out of our conversations. When I’m talking to someone over coffee, or in between working on projects, I sometimes feel that we accept distractions a little too much. Not that every interaction needs to be full, intentional communication — chatter serves its purpose too — but when I notice attention getting fuzzy, I try to really dive into that person’s story. Doing interviews with all sorts of people constantly reminds me how much both parties can learn and evolve through the deep telling and absorption of stories. When stories are written, do they automatically receive more weight?

• Are you using stories to cement the past or to build a new path? To preserve a long-held narrative, or to explore a new one?

There are certain stories that seem to pop up every time I’m getting closer to someone, or every time someone is asking about my life and how I came to where I am today. It feels weird when I notice these little narratives that maintain the same form, because I realize that I use them to build my identity. But sometimes I take a step back and realize that the story needs to be opened up a bit — hindsight, after all, brings a lot of new insights into the mix, and it never hurts to re-explore even your own narratives. When I tell people how I ended up in Thailand, for example, I  become aware of how many factors and parts of me are neglected in the way I tell it. We can never show the whole picture, but it’s worth aiming to accept a wider view sometimes.

In my experience, committing to exploring other people’s narratives almost always triggers me to question and open up my own stories. And that applies to my personal stories, but also to the narratives of history or politics or beliefs that I’ve soaked up over the years. Of course you could always just challenge these views with a newspaper article or a book, but the effect often resides more deeply within you when it comes from a personal connection through opening to someone else’s story.

What are your thoughts on these questions? What are your channels, who is your audience?

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photo by sharif

Recent events surrounding the election in Iran have brought up a swirl of questions that have been lurking in my mind for quite some time, as I’m researching and developing strategies for using social media for social change. So here goes, a post on current events tied into many of the themes you’re used to seeing around here — innovation, tools, questioning, and all that good stuff. Anyway, this post is only ostensibly political, as I’m not expressing support for a political group or candidate — though I am sincerely hoping for transparency, nonviolence, and constructive discussion in Iran.

There’s a lot of talk these days around the internet about the protests in Iran being some sort of “Twitter revolution.” And true, it has been fascinating to watch a movement unfold with real-time updates, vibrant multimedia coverage, and exciting new channels of communication. Twitter has indeed been an excellent tool for unclogging the information pipes and spreading news updates from the ground, despite government blocking of many networks. And yes, Twitter has also been used for some aspects of protest organization in Tehran. Twitter got a big chunk of the international community talking (or tweeting?) about the current events in Iran, watching YouTube videos of protests, and sharing photos of rallies and violence on Flickr. So we can agree that Twitter and other social media have been very useful for:

• providing updates and multimedia coverage that most mainstream news sources did not keep up with
• allowing Iranians to bypass censorship to a certain degree — when many communication platforms were closed by the government, people still found ways to post messages on Twitter
• sparking widespread discussion on a current event
• providing Iranians with another means of organizing demonstrations
• giving some Iranian protesters a global (virtual) platform for advocating their cause

But just because Twitter and blogs have been our principal connection to these important events, must we draw the conclusion that Twitter is the revolutionary force in Iran’s social unrest? The people out in the streets of Tehran were not moved to protest by Twitter. They were not empowered by social media to defy the powers that be. No, their impetus for action came from a much deeper place. I think if we all took a step back from the computer screen, we would realize the importance of recognizing the line between being a movement and supporting a movement.

Social media is a tool. It is a potentially powerful tool that has added a vibrant facet to media coverage and activism, but it should not be treated as the silver bullet of social change. People would be out in the streets with or without Twitter. It’s easy to watch YouTube videos and see #IranElection hashtags fly by and believe that we, the digerati, are in the throes of a violent revolution. It’s also easy to start thinking that all of Iran is out in those streets. But take a breath. Recognize that although the coverage we are seeing may make it seem like “the golden truth” is breaking the chains of oppression and censorship, this coverage has limits too. And recognize that we are sitting in computer chairs, not facing secret police on motorcycles in the streets of Tehran.

Hence, the use of social media around these protests also warrants a few reminders:

• The population of internet-savvy and Twitter-connected Iranians is limited. And it’s a population that’s part of a very specific demographic (young, urban, affluent) that tends to support a specific type of candidate (in this case, Moussavi).
• While it is extremely valuable to view firsthand reports of events on the ground, it is also worth recognizing when these are from someone who is completely invested in one side of the conflict. It’s worth remembering that these may be representative of only certain groups of people.
• A large number of people reading, commenting on, and re-tweeting this information are doing so without any context. This highlights the danger of social media oversimplifying political issues that are incredibly complex. It is misleading, for example, to imply any similarities between the Obama and Moussavi candidacies. Look at Moussavi’s history in Iranian government, and ask yourself if you know details of his political intentions.
• The real-time nature of Twitter allows important information to go viral, but it also allows some questionable ideas to go viral. Think about and digest what you read; don’t swallow before chewing.
• Social media latches onto fads, but it can drop them just as quickly. How many will follow Iranian politics once the #IranElection tweets stop flying?

I hope this post doesn’t sound like I’m trying to put a huge damper on the power of social media for social change. I am simply responding to the flurry and the hype with a cautious reminder to be conscious and to respond with questions and challenges. But I want to end this on a positive note. I think that social media truly is a powerful means of giving local struggles a globally connected platform. Social media can be an effective tool for advocacy and communication, allowing the driving forces of a movement to garner the support and exposure that can be so vital. I am currently working on strategies for nonprofits and activists to use social media, so I clearly believe that these tools introduce important potential.

So let’s remember that these tools are new, and we are only just learning their limits and powers as they are tested. Tools can open new doors, as long as we are intentional about how we wield them. As we discussed in this post last week, there’s a fine balance between the tool and how you use it. So let’s make the most of those progressive and powerful uses with the awareness and sincerity that they merit.

photo by bixentro

The first-ever Essential Prose contest has come to a close, and I’m extremely excited to introduce you to the winner.

Amber Shah will use nakedcreativity.com to launch a unique platform for people to connect through their raw, creative ideas and schemes. There’s a catch — here it is in Amber’s own words:

Unedited writing.

It would be a blog-ish platform where users could post their thoughts and network with others.  The kicker would be that when they logged in and started typing, it was all automatically saved and posted.  No editing like in blogs.  No deleting entries like in twitter.

The nakedness is that you really just get it out there as it comes out of your head.  The creativity is all the zaniness that might follow.

Amber and I have already chatted a bit, and I think her idea is ripe with potential. If you’re excited about her idea too, you can say hi to Amber on Twitter — she’s @AmberShah. She’d love to connect with all you creatives for ideas, brainstorming, and also some guidance for the techie side of things. Help her make this into an incredible new platform!

As always, you can spark discussion and ask questions in the comments section below.

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photo by aubergene

Today I’d like to do something fun. It’s the first Essential Prose contest, and it’s slightly ridiculous.

A while back, I bought the domain www.NakedCreativity.com in a flurry of inspired excitement. Alas, the excitement died down and I found neither the time nor the motivation to make a website worthy of such a domain name.

The contest is simple. If you have an awesome idea for the Naked Creativity website, write your idea in the comments below. The contest will end at 11:59pm EST on Thursday, June 11th, at which point I will choose the most brilliant idea. The person with the most brilliant idea wins the domain!

I really just think it’s a domain that deserves something wonderful/hilarious/insane on it, so I’m turning to you all to see what you’ve got.

If there are too many good ideas, I may need to enlist a trusty judge to help me out.

Also, it’s not required for entering the contest, but I’d love for you Tweet about the contest, and subscribe to this blog so you can find out who the winner is!

Fire away! You have one week to win this spectacular domain.

[Note: Including XXX content or nudity in your idea isn't a prerequisite for winning... I promise.]