Solitude and Creativity

Solitude - The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People. this article is from zenhabits.net

Creativity flourishes in solitude. With quiet, you can hear your thoughts, you can reach deep within yourself, you can focus

I makes “sure to be creative first thing in the morning, before doing anything for the outside world, really sets the day up for me. It makes it feel that CREATING is my job, not answering emails.” - Felicia Day, actress

“Do nothing. I have a habit of welcoming time away from my creative work. For me this is serious life-recharging time where my only responsibility is to just be Mom & Wife & Me. Doing nothing has a way of synthesizing what is really important in my life and in my work and inspires me beyond measure. When I come back to work I am better equipped to weed out the non-essential stuff and focus on the things I most want to express creatively.” Ali Edwards – an author, designer, and leading authority on scrapbooking.

“Find Quiet. Creativity sometimes washes over me during times of intense focus and craziness of work, but more often I get whacked by the creative stick when I’ve got time in my schedule. And since my schedule is a crazy one and almost always fills up if I’m just “living”, I tend to carve out little retreats for myself. I get some good thinking and re-charge time during vacations, or on airplanes, but the retreats are more focused on thinking about creative problems that I’m wanting to solve. That’s why I intentionally carve time out. I make room for creativity. Intentionally. The best example of what I mean by a retreat is a weekend at my family’s cabin. It’s a 90 minute drive from my house on the coast. There are few distractions. Just a rocky beach and a cabin from the 60’s with wood paneling and shag carpet. I go for walks, hikes, naps. I read. I did get an internet signal put in there to stay connected if I need it. But the gist is QUIET. Let there be space for creativity to fill your brain.” Chase Jarvis – an award-winning photographer.

The best art is created in solitude, for good reason: it’s only when we are alone that we can reach into ourselves and find truth, beauty, soul. Some of the most famous philosophers took daily walks, and it was on these walks that they found their deepest thoughts. My best writing, and in fact the best of anything I’ve done, was created in solitude. solitude gives time for thought. In being alone, we get to know ourselves, we face our demons, and deal with them. We get space to create, space to unwind, and find peace . We get time to reflect on what we’ve done, and learn from it. Isolation from the influences of other helps us to find our own voice, quiet helps us to appreciate the smaller things that get lost in the roar - Leo Babauta from zenhabits.net

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – prolific and influential composer of the Classical era

“On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.” - Albert Einstein – theoretical physicist

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka – one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of 20th century literature.

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.” - Nikola Tesla – inventor

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – German writer and polymath

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” - Pablo Picasso

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Osho on Aloneness - Strangers

You have to accept the fact that you are living alone -- maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don´t touch each other, never touch each other.
That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years -- it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don´t know who you are, that you don´t know who I am. I myself don´t know who I am, so how can you know? But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know-- and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.
Nobody knows you, not even you, so don´t expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don´t forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation. But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don´t let this aloneness come to your conscious mind -- and there lies the whole secret.
You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you.

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Relationships

The following is from A Conscious Person's Guide to
Relationships by Ken Keyes, Jr. (ISBN 0-915972-00-X),
Chapter 8:

8

Involvement, Yes;
Addiction, No.

To get the most from your relationship, you'll find it helpful
to distinguish between involvement with a person and addiction
to being with the person. Let's define these two kky terms.
Involvement means "l share my life with you." Addiction means "l
create the experience that I am lost without you. I need you to
be happy."

Involvement means spending a lot of time together. Addiction
means creating emotion-backed demands in my head that dictate
what my partner should say and do -- it means "ownership."
Involvement means that I choose to share a large part of my life
with my beloved and build a mutual reality together. Addiction
means that I feel insecure without someone -- l want him or her
to save me. My involvement gives me the opportunity to
experience all of the beautiful, loving things that a
relationship can bring into my life. It also lets us shoulder
together the responsibilities and problems of life and develop a
mutual trust. Addiction opens a can of worms that makes me
tarnish the beauty of my relationship. It makes me impose a lot
of emotion-backed models of how my partner should be for me to
let myself be happy.

Since involvement offers us the deeper enjoyments of a
relationship, and addiction leads to misery in a relationship,
let's look more closely at how involvement and addiction
interact. It's possible to have a relationship in which there
is:
1. Maximum involvement and maximum addiction.
2. Minimum involvement and maximum addiction.
3. Minimum involvement and minimum addiction.
4. Maximum involvement and minimum addiction.

Since these four possibilities create varying degrees of heaven
or hell in a relationship, let's find out how you can set up
your relationship so that it can be as heavenly as possible.
But first, remember that I am talking about your own involvement
and your own addictions. It does not refer to what your partner
says or does. Instead it puts the spotlight on how you are
operating your head. And this is good news. Any approach to
getting the most out of life that depends on manipulating or
changing another person is ultimately doomed to fail. But when
you know how to succeed within yourself, you have all the aces
in your hand. Actually it's only your mental habits that stand
between you and your continuous enjoyment of the melodrama of
your life.

Let's look at setup number one -- maximum involvement with
maximum addiction. In this state you have deeply involved your
life with the life of another person. You are living with your
partner, and are usually with him or her many hours each day.
You are addicted to being with this person. You have
"territorial" feelings toward your beloved; you have many
emotion-backed demands of how this person should act to fit your
models. We often call this situation "romantic love." Once the
romance is killed by addictions, what's left is just "possessive
love."

Romantic or possessive love is unstable and tends to be
emotionally explosive. Frequently heard are such statements as
"lf you really loved me you would . . . ." (fill in your
addictive demand). This romantic-possessive aspect of the
maximum involvement and maximum addiction phase keeps you yo-
yoing up and down. You're very happy when things are fitting
your addictions; you're very unhappy when they aren't. And in
this phase, love is highly conditional. I love you when you
meet my addictive models, and I'm rejecting you when you don't.
Romantic or possessive love can create beautiful feelings at
times. But it is a bumpy road-often with a washout at the end.

Now let's look at what happens when you have minimum involvement
and maximum addiction. This is when the tears get to flow in
your soap opera. It's usually called "broken heart." Minimum
involvement means that you do not spend much time (or any time)
with the other person, but you're still creating the experience
that your happiness depends on being with him or her. Minimum
involvement and maximum addiction sets you up for triggering
disillusionment, cynicism, anger, resentment and the whole
Pandora's box of separating emotions. Although you're not
involved in living together, your mind can still produce an
intense experience of jealousy.

A third type of situation occurs when there is minimum
involvement and minimum addiction. It's often called "good
friends." Since minimum involvement means that you're not
spending much time together, you're not tuning in to the richer
veins of human experience that more involvement offers.
However, you're not creating a lot of stuff either, since your
mind is not playing out heavy addictions about how the
relationship should be. With minimum involvement and minimum
addiction, your relationship is generally a light and pleasant
one.

It's the fourth state that gives you all of the goodies of a
deep relationship and none of the unhappiness. This is
characterized by maximum involvement and minimum addiction. In
this state, you consciously enjoy the relationship and
realistically play the relationship game. By living together
and having the opportunity to more deeply participate in each
other's thoughts and feelings, you have the greatest opportunity
to create all of the beautiful sharings that the relationship
can bring you. And yet by minimizing your addiction, you do not
keep the here-and-now muddied up with emotion-backed demands
that your partner say and do things differently.

In this ideal state, your love is less and less conditional.
You can communicate with your partner and tell him or her what
you prefer in the relationship. But you quickly work on
yourself to handle any addictions you are creating that can chip
away at your feelings of love. You get to cooperate in the
great adventure of life together and to contribute to each
other's well-being. Here's a chart that can be helpful in
sorting out how involvement and addiction interact to determine
the quality and quantity of your relationship.


INVOLVEMENT ADDICTION WHAT'S HAPPENING

Romantic or
Maximum Maximum Possessive Love

Minimum Maximum Broken Heart

Minimum Minimum Friends

All the Goodies
Maximum Minimum No Unhappiness

The importance of working on your addictions is spotlighted by
what I'm going to call the "law" governing relationships: IF YOU
DON'T HANDLE YOUR ADDICTIONS, YOU'LL AUTOMATICALLY DECREASE YOUR
INVOLVEMENT. From this it follows that to maintain a high level
of involvement or to increase your involvement, you must handle
your addictions. Now you've got the key to living "happily ever
after" -- or at least knowing what the problem is!

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Love Freedom and Aloneness - The Koan of Relationships

From the Book of the same name by Osho

We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Aloneness is our very nature, but we are not aware of it. Because we are not aware of it, we remain strangers to ourselves, and instead of seeing our aloneness as a tremendous beauty and bliss, silence and peace, at-easeness with existence, we misunderstand it as loneliness.
Loneliness is a misunderstood aloneness. Once you misunderstand your aloneness as loneliness, the whole context changes. Aloneness has a beauty and grandeur, a positivity; loneliness is poor, negative, dark, dismal.
Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. To escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family, to have husbands and wives, to have children. In this crowd, the basic effort is that you will be able to forget your loneliness but nobody has ever succeeded in forgetting it.

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