The Direction of Intention

The truth is that I could talk with MM all day. Our calls are few and far between but it always feels as if we’re picking up a conversation from yesterday. His perspective on life is vast, deeply rooted like an oak tree, yet simple enough to play on a banjo. As per usual, he left me with a head-full-of-thoughts-to-think.

One of the thought-rocks he dropped on my head was this: we’ve lost touch with our connection to the humanities. And, we’ve lost that connection, not by accident, but through reckless intention. Years ago I was wide-eyed with disbelief when the local school system stripped history and the humanities from their course offerings to make more room for STEM; science, technology, engineering and math. “Short-sighted and fundamentally stupid,” I said to no one listening. Art was long gone. Music was nowhere to be found.

It’s hard to measure the real worth of the humanities on a test so it was sailed off the edge-of-the-curriculum-world. What , exactly, is the value of kindness, the worth of considering others, the merit of empathy and understanding interconnectivity? How important is it to know where you come from? The origin and cycles of knowledge and the grand mistakes of the past? What might be your intellectual lineage, your moral ancestry? How important is it to consider opposing ideas, to recognize there are many ways of seeing a single event? What happened the last time an out-of-control authoritarian impulse attempted to quash a diversity of opinion? How worthwhile might it be to understand that democracy is nothing more or less than an idea about how humans might create community together? It is not a given. It is not a fact. It is an ongoing relationship. The province of the humanities.

The operative word is “together.”

I laughed aloud the day after my call with MM. Two articles crossed my screen. Because I’m searching for jobs I’m paying attention to articles like The Ten Most Important Skills For Workers. You’ll not be surprised to learn that analytical thinking currently tops the chart but the king is about to be unseated by a new/old champion: creative thinking. Also rising in the top ten are “curiosity and lifelong learning” and “motivation and self-awareness” Of course, “unmotivated and unconscious” have probably never topped the list of desirable skills…though most factory work – and varieties of corporate work – generally produce those qualities in previously motivated human beings.

[I take a moment of silence to recount the multiple times I have, in my life, been told I was un-hire-able because I was too creative. “You’ll see how to improve things and want to make changes,” a manager famously told me. “My job,” he said, “is to keep that from happening. To maintain the status quo.” In another famous jaw-dropping moment, a potential employer told me I was not an attractive hire because I was educated so, “I would want things.”]. A cautionary tale to all those who currently fear exposure to ideas and the other purported horrors of the humanities and a fully educated mind.

Educated = curious = questioning. It’s simple.

Listen to Sir Ken Robinson ask a still-relevant question about whether or not our schools kill creativity. Killing creativity is the same as killing the humanities. Killing our humanity.

Ultimately the horse race between the analytical and the creative is itself symptom of the schooled ignorance. They are not really separate things. The right brain and left brain are only detached for the sake of study and discourse. They are ends of a spectrum and one cannot exist without the other. Like science and art: both are concerned with dancing to the beating heart and movement of the universe. They are two ways of walking at the yet-unknown. They are not oppositional.

Another quote from MM roared into my mind: if you ignore 100,000 years of human evolution, you might-could just miss the fundamentals.

It’s consilience. The unity of knowledge. The whole system. Heart and brain and gut. That’s the loop that MM and I regularly travel. We circle out and return once again to E.O. Wilson.

“One day we’ll figure it out,” posits MM. It’s another reason I adore our conversations: with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he is, all the same, infinitely hope-full.

read Kerri’s blogpost about CREATIVE THINKING

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