My nephew Phillip is extremely creative. His father, Brian, wonders if that’s why he moved his family here to Nashville a few years ago - not so Brian and I could work together, but so I could help interpret Phillip to him and reassure him on a regular basis that Phillip’s completely normal. For a creative person.
Creative people are weird complex. So this series is my attempt to explain us to anyone having to work or live with us. Each statement is laid out as a contradiction. I’m borrowing heavily from researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People but putting him in my own words. It’s more creative that way.
Keep in mind that these are generalities, which means they won’t be true all the time for everyone.
1. Energetic and reserved. Creatives aren’t lazy. We were built with two modes: work and idle. It’s important essential for a creative person to spend time in both.
When doing something they’re passionate about (something creative) creatives can focus and work feverishly for long hours at a time, forgetting to eat or go to the bathroom, sometimes staying up late, toiling long after every sane person has gone to bed. This is the work mode and it’s taxing even when it doesn’t look it would be. It may seem like I’m merely sitting at my computer typing, but what’s happening in my head is more than one fast-paced conversation (we’ll get to that later). It may look like I’m just painting or singing leisurely but my emotions and thoughts are thick, consuming every bit of my attention. Sometimes I look like I’m doing nothing at all, just sitting, but in my head a problem and a million solutions are being turned and examined from every perspective. It’s not hard work by any means, but it’s intense and isolating - I’m truly incapable of being fully present and fully involved with everything and everyone around me.
Thus the need for an idle mode. Without idle mode we’d have no relationships or much of a life. Creative people intuitively manage their creative energy by expending very little energy between creative sprints (or marathons). Some creatives sleep a lot. Others golf or eat or find some other way to relax. I shut my computer, ban music from being played in the house (hearing music sets off a work mode in my head), and just play with my kids or sit under a tree with my wife, or go for a drive alone.
Here’s the kicker though. I can’t always control my modes. I may be on a date with my wife, for instance. She’s talking to me about the movie we just saw. We’re laughing, having a great time. And all of a sudden, something she says sparks an idea. Seconds later a complete melody is playing in my mind, buzzing in my brain louder than the world around me. I don’t hear her anymore. I want to, but I can’t. I have to find a pen and something to write on or call our home phone and leave this melody on the answering machine in hopes that making a record of the idea will appease it for the next hour at least so I can get on with my life.
If you live with a creative person…
Remember the importance of both modes and allow time for each, within reason, without harming yourself or others.
Remember that our hand isn’t always able to reach the switch - we’re often as annoyed with us as you are when there’s a mode change.
When mode changes without warning, especially if we’re young and new to all this, we can feel out of control. Planning a break and setting goals helps control the modes.
Did any of this help?
"I hope it was worth your trip,” the chaplain said.
“A four hour drive in exchange for fifty-two lives. Yep,” I laughed, “I think that’s a pretty good trade.”
And unexpected.
King College only has about 500 residential students. And only 120 of those crowded into the old wooden pews this morning for the chapel service. They represent incredibly diverse Christian traditions too. Most of the faculty are Presbyterian. Many of the students are too. But they’re the minority, outnumbered by a slew of other backgrounds including some folks who grew up leaping pews and handling snakes on Sunday mornings in the mountains of East Tennessee.
The old chapel walls were lined with large silk banners decorated with words and beliefs that make us one - ideals every Christian can agree upon. Halfway through the service one of them caught my eye and without thinking about where the diversion might take us, I read it out loud: Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Another passage came to mind: In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead...You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.
My eyes closed. I played one last song while Compassion packets were passed out to anyone raising their hand. The students were dismissed and made my way back to the Compassion table to collect filled-out forms and answer questions about Compassion’s ministry if anyone had them. And it was only then that I realized what had happened. We’d run out of packets.
Before the service had begun, the chaplain and I had discussed attendance numbers and how many packets he thought we’d hand out. He and I reasoned we had about twenty too many packets. Turned out we reasoned wrong.
Students ran late to classes and lunch to stay around filling out their forms. Ben ran to the car to get more packets. Two girls sponsored together. Four guys sponsored together. This team sponsored a child. That campus ministry sponsored a child. Professors. Students. Presbyterians and snake handlers side-by-side around a table loving not with words but with action.
Now we’ve got another hour until we head to a local church to pay a concert and ask another crowd to do the same.
I was on lunch duty today. From my perch at the front of the classroom I watched second and third graders wrestle with Caprisun packages, ziplock bags and themselves. One emerged the victor. Make that two.
It all began when a cluster of third grade boys called Kathy “chicken nose.” Kathy laughed at first. She rolled her eyes, giggled and whispered with a friend. “Chicken nose with chicken legs,” the boys continued until Kathy’s giggles were smothered by her shame.
Fortunately, third grade boys have the attention spans of chihuahuas on speed and quickly moved onto to other amusements. Unfortunately, second grade boys do everything they see third grade boys do.
A second grader in a blue shirt, sitting at a rectangular table, put down his sandwich and leaned over his neighbor to have a word with a smallish kid at the end going to town on a box of Lunchables. “Go tell Kathy she’s a chicken nose,” he said.
“No,” the boy in white answered, laying a small circle of ham on a cracker precisely.
The kid in blue, a little annoyed that he’d been disobeyed, gripped the shoulder of the boy in white and insisted again, more firmly this time. “If you don’t go tell her you’re never coming to my house. Ever.”
The boy sandwiched between the two, a pale lanky kid in all green, interrupted. “If I go tell her can I come to your house?”
“Yes.”
And with that the boy in green slammed his drink down on the table, stood and walked over to Kathy. “You’re a chicken head, Kathy,” he seethed. And went back to his seat to collect high fives from the boy in blue.
Then I watched the boy in white stand without saying a word. He walked over to Kathy, knelt down beside her and spoke the most miraculous words for a second grade boy. “I won’t call you a chicken head,” he said, “You’re a good person, Kathy.”
There were no high fives offered back at his seat. But Kathy smiled.
A cold front moved into the netherworld this morning as I was featured on a website of the sport-y variety. An actual athlete, a guy who knows the name and rules of every major sport in this hemisphere, posted an interview with me on his site. My answers were predictably lame.
I think you could do better. Because you own a “jock strap” or a “sports bras.” Hopefully not both. And you know what RBI stands for, and what the difference between a period and a quarter is and to which sports these terms belong. You, my friend, exercised in high school by lifting band nerds like me with one ripped arm, possibly even your left one to make it challenging, and dunking their head in the nearest toilet. Unleash your competitive inner self once again and take a stab at these questions that left me stumped.
(As always, bonus points for sarcasm.)
1. What number best describes the role sports play in your life on a scale of 1 to 10?
2. Rank your 3 overall favorite sports, college or pro.
3. What is the one team that you root for more passionately than any other, and is there a team that you hate, maybe a little too much?
4. Do you play fantasy sports?
5. What is the most memorable sporting event you have ever attended in person?
6. What is the best highlight and/or worst lowlight of your sports playing career as a child or as an adult?
7. If you could change one thing about sports, what would it be?
8. Do you have an opinion on Christian athletes who, without being prompted, talk about their faith in post-game interviews?
9. High school gym class…your favorite 45 minutes of the day or the source of countless nightmares and embarrassments?
10. Sports are often the whipping boy of pastors and clergy because so much passion, money, time, and energy is poured into them. Do you think this criticism is valid, or are sports okay as a diversion from the stresses of life.\
11. If you had to compete against other musicians, in which of these 5 competitions would you have the best chance of winning? 5-mile run, 18 holes of golf, free throw shooting contest, arm wrestling match, or a game of bowling.
12. What is your favorite sports movie of all-time?
Go here to read the answers of a sissy boy soft rock star...who can get his bowl on thanks to Baylor University’s superior physical education program.
I barely know the five people I’ll be traveling with to Dominican Republic in November. Right now. We’ve only exchanged a handful of e-mails and talked for a few minutes by phone so far. But give us time and there may be a sleepover.
I didn’t know Shannon before we traveled to Uganda together to fend off monkeys and play with kids. But now? Well, when Shannon heard I was coming to Tulsa, her stomping grounds, she e-mailed immediately asking telling me she’d be picking Ben and I up from the airport and that we’d be staying at her house for the weekend. So she did. And we did.
Saturday night, after plopping down tired at her kitchen table, in an unforgettable act of true friendship, Shannon allowed me to partake of a few Snickers bars and some wow-these-actually-aren’t-as-nasty-as-you’d-expect caramel apple Hershey’s kisses. By a “few” and “some,” I mean a quantity approximating the weight of a middle schooler. Approximately. Give or take a pair of shoes.
Then she and her wow-he’s-actually-not-as-boring-as-you’d-expect-a-finance-major-to-be husband hung out with us while we geeked out about blogging stuff for a couple hours. Then we painted each other’s nails and curled each other’s bangs and watched High School Musical (Zack Efron is so dreamy) and...OK, we didn’t do any of that stuff. But Shannon and Ben really wanted to. But I was tired.
Shannon let Ben and I crash in her kids’ rooms sans kids. I’m a good friend so I took the smaller bed. And I let Ben have the bigger one. With flowerdy sheets. In the room with pink walls and lots of dolls. He gets lonely.
Then Sunday afternoon, after I played and spoke at Cedar Ridge Christian Church, we hung out some more at Shannon’s house. I just did a bunch of nothing. Shannon probably had no idea what a gift that was. Through no fault of anyone else, I rarely feel completely relaxed on the road, able to turn totally “off”, unless it’s just me and Ben. I don’t mind it, but almost everyone on the road calls me “Shaun Groves,” a reminder that to them I’m an artist and not completely human and and they as me lots of questions: about how I got started in music, about whether I know this artist or that, about politics or theology, about whether I sing the word “toast” in After The Music Fades. Again, I don’t mind it. I’m thankful anyone wants to talk to me at all. And I know that the beginning of every relationship is a lot of get-to-know-you questions. But the greatest gift Shannon gave me this weekend was a Sunday afternoon of being “off.” Of being called “Shaun.” I tickled her daughter. Talked guitars a little with one of her boys. Crumpled into a couch. Took a nap. Totally relaxed.
Then Shannon and her twin/mom and her dad volunteered at the Compassion table Sunday night during my concert. Now, look, I’m not the manliest of men, OK, admittedly, but I teared up a little when I left the stage and walked out into the lobby of that church and saw Shannon explaining Compassion’s ministry to the crowd gathered around the table, taking child sponsorship forms from people, thanking them for releasing a child from poverty, wearing her Compassion t-shirt - the uniform of Compassion volunteers.
Here’s a woman, I thought, once a total stranger to me and Compassion. That was only nine months ago. And today she’s a friend to both of us. Together, my friend Shannon and I, we introduced 88 people to children in the developing world Sunday. Thanks, Shannon. For everything.
