Last night I finished watching It Might Get Loud, a Davis Guggenheim film about a single instrument: the electric guitar. The film features three electric guitar virtuosos, each with differing styles and from separate generations: Jack White, from The White Stripes, The Edge, from U2, and Jimmy Page, lead guitarist for Led Zeppelin. During the film each guitarist shared about his own creative approach. I was fascinated by The Edge’s description of U2’s creative process. He said the band will spend days in the studio slogging through various soundscapes. Most days are long, tiring, and frustrating. It is common for the four band members to end the day with absolutely nothing to show for it. But if they remain committed to this arduous, mundane process long enough something brilliant begins to emerge.

We don’t need to be a platinum-selling artist to recognize this kind of brilliance. A sprig of green emerges in your garden. A child demonstrates she is beginning to understand long-division. A friend finally receives the kudos from his employer that he’s always deserved.

The Edge said the only reason U2 ever arrives at brilliant musical moments is because of one thing: commitment. As a whole they are committed to showing up and working hard. Over the span of three decades the world-renown band has learned to trust this process. If they show up, work hard, and engage with and trust each other and the process, something beautiful can and will happen.

Early in our process with others, consciously or unconsciously, we identify what we would consider brilliant. You want your son to learn to play Moonlight Sonata, for example. This is a good and worthy goal. But committing to the creative process is difficult. Showing up is not sufficient. You need to be engaged. Then you can know you’ll be around to behold the brilliance that finally shines through. He strings together a few bars. It’s not the whole song, but it sure doesn’t sound like Yanni. So you stay with it. He strings a few more bars together and eventually he can play the entire Sonata, and with feeling.

Most aspects of the creative process encourage us to bail out. Exit doors flank us each step of the way. Committing to stay with and trust the process can seem to border on the absurd. Why commit to something so frustrating? Because some part of us knows better. We know something shot through with goodness awaits us. This is why we commit, show up, and engage with the people and pastimes we care about. What makes U2’s creative process meaningful and productive are the same elements that make for rewarding artful endeavors and rich, enduring relationships. We may not make music. But whatever our interests and calling, through commitment, engagement, patience and trust something extraordinary will stumble out of the fog to greet us.

Tags: commitment, creative process, engagement

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At some point in the near future someone will most likely ask if you know someone else. This is a common occurrence. I just returned from coffee with a friend. Sure enough, we each raised the question more than once. But in what sense do we mean we know, or don’t know another person? In most situations we mean to affirm the existence of a particular human being. It’s a binary question: his or her existence is something of which we are or are not aware.

I would say I know my wife, my children, and my friends. What I mean is that these people are very familiar to me. Their presence in my life is something I’m accustomed to, and for which I am grateful. But there can be a life-sucking, dark underbelly to this kind of familiarity. Through familiarity we come to assume we truly know a person. The unfortunate result is that we only detect what we’ve known of this person. What we fail to recognize, when we place people in an “identity prism,” is how we have numbed our senses to perceiving new, previously unseen fractals of an individual’s identity.

In 8th grade I needed to watch a video I missed while home sick. So I showed up early one morning, before most teachers. I had a janitor open my teacher’s classroom. I wheeled out from the closet his ginormous VHS and TV and got the show rolling. At some point during the video my teacher entered the room. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Oh, hi, Andrew. You got in. You’re all set. Wow, you’re smarter than you look.” Realizing his faux pas, he began to stammer and backpedal. I told him not worry about it. (The upside of this encounter has been my firm pledge to look far smarter than I actually am.)

The industriousness I demonstrated on that morning in 8th grade did not fit my teacher’s perception of me. He thought he had gotten “the essential Andrew.” I catch myself doing this with my own family and friends. I limit what I see in terms of who I think they are. There is a sense in which I need this person to not change. When people change, we have to change. If we can perceive them as static beings we don’t have to work so hard. Life is predictable. We want people to be like McDonald’s. No matter where you go in the world a Big Mac tastes the same. We have an appetite for consistency and predictability. People, when you really get to know them, are neither.

We can’t help knowing people based on how we’ve experienced them in the past. What else could we draw on? What we can help is the capacity for surprise that we cultivate within ourselves. We can learn, I believe, to develop an expectation for awe and wonder. This may sound woo-woo. But I’m talking grist here, the meat and potatoes of relationships. What I know is that if I study the people around me more, and look for things I’ve not before seen, I begin to recognize brilliance–but only if I watch long enough and with interest.

Picture a group of people getting out of a helicopter on a live volcano. Their faces are lit with interest and curiosity. This is new and fresh. This is not your everyday kind of thing. These people let the land teach them. They want it to teach them. This is how we should relate to people. Let them write a continuous, unfolding narrative of their identity. This begins when we push out the walls that limit our perception and work to create a crater-sized capacity for surprise. This comes naturally atop a live volcano. Humans are no less unpredictable, evolving, and intriguing.

Tags: cultivating relationships, understanding others

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During my junior year in college I took a course in Evolutionary Biology. We all feared the professor. He was, as every student well knew, not one to mess with. During one of his lectures he suddenly threw down his chalk, slammed his hands on the lectern and began to yell at our class, saying he was through with all of the challenging questions he received. I remember being stunned and confused. I had no idea what he was talking about. He stormed out of the class. We all sat for a moment, stunned, as though he had just spoken in tongues. The next day the professor walked into class, slapped a stack of midterm exams on the table and announced, “I am not available for questions.” I’m pretty sure this violated some sort of university ethical code, but none of us were about to cite scripture and verse. The day after the exam the university dean came in to “get to the bottom of all of this.” Without exception, we all said we had no idea what so enraged the professor. He left the college shortly after.

I’ve reflected on this scene many times since. The students in our class sought to understand key concepts. I recall one of my classmates asking, “Can you explain again how through evolution the jaw bone migrated to become an ear bone?” I remember this question because I think it may have been the match to the tinder that sent our professor into his rage. But the student’s question was sincere. Like the rest of us, he was trying to see through the professor’s lenses, and learn. Tragically, our youthful attempts to grasp the concepts our professor espoused only served to incite his wrath, and estrange him from the students he was supposed to enlighten.

My professor’s refusal to empathetically engage his students was to his loss, and ours. When we sincerely invite another to take us on a tour of his or her own perspective we create an opportunity—a safe space—for us both to listen, grow and change. And in the course of exploring our perspectives, something profound happens. Those beliefs and assumptions we’ve held tacitly emerge from obscurity, and sharpen into focus—then we can examine them anew, and broaden our own understanding.

Tags: empathic engagement

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