What's the "Difference"
What makes Breakout Creatives different from others?
“Difference? ”Hmmmm. Very judgmental, isn’t it? And who the hell am I, or you, or anyone to mark someone as different. When it comes right down to it, all the ways we have of marking people as “different” really serve to make us feel good about ourselves: “She may be smart, but I am the one making money,” for instance. These ways of making differences usually is based on a quantity of something: more intelligence, more money, more beauty, more athletic prowess than….; and then there usually follows some kind of reward for there being a quantitatively greater amount of something that is in play.
So, in that vein of thinking, are Breakout Creatives more…. of something, and so others, are less?
No.
They have just the same amount of “stuff” – talent, energy, ambition, smarts, fears -- in various combinations as do others. But what is different about them is their attitude toward their orientation. An attitude doesn’t add any amount of quantitative capability to anything (although a positive attitude may engender something, and a negative attitude might detract, and in either case might result in quantifiable differences) and one’s orientation is not even a matter of one’s ego, but just how one takes up a position, place, a direction in one’s life.
So there is a difference. But it is twice removed from what is quantifiable.
The Attitude: The Resolve to Aspire
What is different about Breakout Creatives: Attitude.
It is their attitude toward their orientation to their lives, work and aspirations that is different.
Their Attitude: An openness and affirming resolve; their orientation: a look outward,toward the as yet not in “existence.” And so they aspire to something that doesn't exist yet.
That difference makes absolutely no difference to anyone else, unless it inspires someone; and it is a difference that while positive, does not result in there being “more” of something that has a price tag, or is quantifiable. Breakout Creatives are different in ways that don’t matter to others (or that at best irritate others for their strangeness, obtuse obscurities and non-participative refusals), unless they too feel a yearning, an aspiration that they too want to treat with resolve.
What is really most important to note in all this is that their attitude flies below the radar of the given world, and sets in motion the kinds of musings and wonderings that just might take hold and make a difference that does matter, down the road. But this process does not take place in any of the ways we have been trained to recognize achievement or newness. Instead, Breakout Creatives do what they do with complete innocence, seemingly oblivious to even the need for recognition – although they feel and often resent the righteous indignation that is thrown their way by our venerated guardians.
What I am saying here is that to appreciate what Breakout Creatives offer, we have to look at “difference” differently.
Maybe, these people are really living in ways that, true, we don’t understand; and maybe, maybe most certainly, they don’t understand either. But, what if affirming a different orientation to the way our living transpires and shapes itself offered something? Or, think of it this way: how else but in such an attitude toward strangeness does anything that affects the human endeavor come about? But to ask that question is already far ahead of us.
Maligned 20-Somethings: An Evolutionary PHenomenon?
I think of an article in the August 21, 2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine about 20-somethings. These people live at home longer, don’t form relational commitments until later in life – than people of preceding generations did. The implication of the article is that these people require a longer gestation period for becoming adults like us, like what we think adults have always been and are supposed to be. And so, one psychologist characterizes this period as “emerging adulthood.”
Now, for me, this all makes sense. When I am in my “adult mode,” that is. Maybe because these kids spend so much time with video games and texting, the “real world” of hard bodies, flesh, feelings and obligations takes longer to get comfortable with. And because the brain isn’t fully formed, the emotions spurred by strangeness become fear, and fear locks one into passivity.
But in my mode as a mentor to breakout creatives, I find this article and its premise appalling.
I ask, why is it that we have to approach people who are "different," with the presumption that our way is the "right" way? And what I mean is, why can't we at least ask whether or not something might be in the works with this generation that we ought to pay attention to, learn from, and examine for seeds of a new nuance to the human endeavor.
My Own 20-Something Years.
I think of my life in those years. According to the norms of those times (the 1960’s), I left home, went to college, the army, grad school, and so I was out on my own – and between you and me, my life was a mess every day. But I didn’t retreat home, I slogged on getting jobs, getting fired, starting businesses, falling in and out of love and relationships. It was ugly, but I was out there!!!
Now, here’s the trip-up question: What if I was wrong to embark out into the “world” this way? What if my insistence of charging into the world was actually deadening and wounding of some other kind of life that my psychic/somatic being was being called to take up? What if staying at home (I cringe at the thought, really) and allowing a slower gestation would have helped more (maybe if college was 6 years, and grad school was 10)? But then, I think there really was a “value” in going out into the world unformed: into this chaotic soup of a psychic fog came lightening bolts of “reality” that formed ways that could be submitted to test, experiment, judgement (my own most of all). Do the stay-at-home 20-somethings get that? Does that matter?
What I am saying is, what if it were the case that evolutionary possibilities now underway in the human fold require longer gestation to take shape and these young people are acting appropriately (albeit deviantly) for the sake of the emergence of a new capability? What if all that testing and experimenting of mine really deflected, defeated and dissipated that impulse toward something outside the circle of certainties? What would have happened in my work if I had been more patient, tolerant, heedful with regard to the very forces that resisted being conventionally molded, smoothed and rendered functional?
Evolutionary What? ... Facultative Development.
"What? " you say. "These lazy, lost, disconnected, texting mutants are avatars of a new evolutionary development? Are you kidding? Is that a real thought?"
Well, yes it is.
Hear me out.
In the world of Breakout Creatives, we envision a process called “Facultative Development.” We think it is possible that the development of new psycho/somatic capabilities for discerning, organizing, expressing and learning did not end either with the rising of language or the instituting of Reason (in the West especially). But that new capabilities, that discern modes that actually generate what we take to be God or our given state of Nature. Ways of engaging moments when great cosmic energies coalesce and constellate into more complex states, even to life.
So, what if we stepped back and wondered if whether this generation might be developing something new? By orienting toward images, by cutting language loose from formality and books, by allowing strange and diffuse emotions to work around before getting pinned down into conventional forms – what if this heralded some new mode of discernment and marked the longer gestation of a more complex faculty?
What if we didn’t enforce our standards on them? What if, instead, with the possibility that Breakout Creative forces are alive and well, right in those messy bedrooms, we fostered an affirming attitude toward this orientation of theirs and helped them engender a formation of something new? And what if we don’t know how to help foster this new way – being ensconced, as we are in our rationally economic-driven habits; and certainly these young people don’t know what is happening or is going to unfold from their forming beings. What if we, and they, just have to wait, and admit that we just don’t know what, if anything is going on here; but maybe?
People who embrace breakout creativity challenge themselves with questions such as this. Now that is different.
