Lives In Progress

Creativity is the energy of change, and cultivating it consistently increases our capacity to navigate life's twists and turns, to successfully keep up with the accelerating pace of change and not burn out in the process. Everyone has this energy, the capacity to learn and adapt that exists at the intersection of thought, feeling, and action. The ability to perceive new, previously unrecognized connections between ideas, or to approach existing circumstances from a range of different perspectives is the expression of this energy of change in daily life.

     Despite the creativity-killers we encounter every day - a steady stream of advertising that shows us how not-enough we are in every way, working harder just to stay afloat, constant pressures and the lingering sense of threat, to name a few - there are techniques for exercising the psychological "muscle" that research shows increase resilience to stress and overall happiness while reducing the emotional exhau…

"Telling a story, and hearing one, is like jumping on a train. A story is about creating what's possible in the world, about taking action, not about being a passive receiver of events. Stories tell you that you can shape the narrative of your life. It's a way of being in the world."                                     Joey Xanders, Artistic Director of The Moth1. Through stories we can benefit from other peoples' experiences."Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems," writes Jonathan Gottschallin The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.We can reap the benefits of engaging with an emotional journey without having to actually go through it ourselves. Stories "are simulated experiments in people-physics," according to Jag Bhalla on Scientific American blog, "freeing us from the limits of our own direct experience."2. Crafting our personal experiences into stories to be shared is a way to rethink pr…