Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression [...]

Task #9: Curious Explorers, Part 2

As well as Luis the volunteer coordinator, I also had the opportunity over the summer to spend some time with an old friend. Close your eyes and think of what a ‘Curious Explorer’ would be like. Bright and lively, constantly open to experience, not fearless but too interested to let opportunities [...]

Task #4: Meaning in Life

Friday night, and I have one more task on my to-do list for today: Baseline Task #4 from Todd’s book, Curious? (I hope first name terms are acceptable now we’re Twitter followers). This one is the Meaning in Life Questionnaire.
It measures how much you find your existence to be significant. Below [...]

“But we are flux” – Muriel Spark

How are we to articulate emotion? Here’s one way, from novelist Muriel Spark via quantum physics.
For the theorist David Bohm, an understanding of life as “the law of the whole movement” is central to all emotion, to the act of creativity and to the renewal of a fragmented person or fragmented culture.
He [...]

A less justified walking

The walk from Bay Ness Farm, where I was camping for the weekend, and into Robin Hood’s Bay follows an old railway line that has been mapped out as a ‘permissive path’ – not a public right of way, but one that is signposted nonetheless.
The line was part of the Scarborough & [...]

Task #1: ‘curious explorers’

As I’ve written about in The Tasks, I’m going through all the exercises in Todd Kashdan’s book Curious? to see how much of a ‘curious explorer’ I can become in my challenge to be a full-time writer and overcome anxiety disorder.
The first six exercises are all ‘baseline’ exercises to evaluate where [...]

The sculpting of wonder

There was a lovely piece in yesterday’s Guardian by the writer Marina Warner on the scuplture of Peter Randall-Page, an artist who draws on natural forms and sources to reposition our perspective on some of the larger questions of experience: love, play, growth, among others.
He has an exhibition on at the Yorkshire [...]

How to be curious when alone

It was important to write something today. As each day is. So on 4th July, the subject is an American author. I’m reading Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone, recommended a long time ago by a friend. A theme that emerges, other than that alluded to by the title, is the [...]