How to Turn Your Internal Blah-Blah into Creative Reflection: Delights of the Ordinary No. 24

The whole Blah-Blah circuit and Delights of the Ordinary now celebrates the community of over 100 readers.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince.

It is a good thing to know someone through letters!

Isn’t it?

I mean, re-reading letters helps us reflect on the nuances that go unseen when we first read them.

Since, in our hyper-tech world we have so many instantaneous 30-second-sort of ways to connect. Video calls, quick phone calls, voice messages, texts and emails to let others know who we are, where we are, what went in our day, our frothy-foamy lattes, our luxurious dining and whatnot.

And then there are these humble letters.

They are slow… and worded, deeply personal, with lots of texture, memories and feelings.

I chose the unhurried kind of communication of the good old letters!

When I began my newsletter Delights of the Ordinary, I wrote to only two people – one was myself and the other was my husband. Because, wobbly anxious startings are fairly torturous and can never make sense, and in my utmost candour I was not even bracing to weave anything mighty!

I only knew I had to write. And I ought to find some platform for it.

Initially, I wrote on my Instagram but soon learned that to start something as sacred as writing, Instagram wasn’t an excellent choice! With its ultra-fast vibes, you are drowned in doom-scroll comparisons and somehow start to believe that quick dopamine kicks are the most promising anxiety soothers. So, to break free from the mental aches of it I challenged myself to build my website and write there. 

And then the website which I created tanked badly. I got tangled into the endless loops of SEO, Google Analytics and so much technical stuff in between, that it took away the whole joy of writing! (You can check my miserable attempt at making my website here and can stay in touch here.)Subscribe

Well-being does not always come to us through the best decisions we make. We are bound to fail and fall. Though, in a way falling is not a bad thing. It is bad if we sit there to pity ourselves for too long.

I remember when I first started learning to bicycle. I was extremely terrified of falling. Then, when I actually fell one day, young boys, my age had a splendid hi-fi-styled pompous laugh seeing me fall and my knees scraping on the tarred road. Life’s validity for a twelve-year-old invariably comes from having a lot of fun. It may not matter whose cost you get it! 

I was so ashamed for so many months that I never went out biking during the day or in mild noons. I found the dusk-lit roads to bike when no one watched. In some ways, the shame of falling is a deep cultural thing.

It is entertaining to our egocentric selves when we see people fall. It is not just a child’s thing. It puffs up in grown-ups too. It is etched in our fallenness! And it has to take a lot of rectification to allow us not to feel wonderful when others fall.

My mom who smiled knowing I fell, then told me, “It is ok. You can get up too.’ To keep reminding her wisdom amidst the noisiest shame in that age was my finest courage. And I am happy to see her words through my memories! 

The Whole Blah-Blah Circuit and Reflection

Harvard Business Review in one of their study asked 442 professionals to reflect on incidents that impacted them to make the most progress in their professional growth and in ‘making them better leaders.’ Three distinct points came out as an outcome of the study: surprise, frustration, and failure.

In this study, the negative sentiments -failures, frustration and shocking surprises were their places to grow. Unlike reports on a spreadsheet, very few things in life will ever move in a straightforward line. In work or learning to cycle or in life, there are very few foolproof successes.

Successes need failures. And to learn from failures we need self-reflection.

And so when all our internal blah-blah (like my blah-blah stories above) rings in our head without limits. Like ping-pong-ing itself in slipshod degrees. Like leading us into formative shame or guilt, then it is time to turn all of it into a practice of reflection. It is important to keep the fall and thumps not distant from us. I have learned more from falling on rugged roads (bicycle or life) than from success. It is incredibly gracious and artistic to reflect on and remember the things that shaped you.

James Baldwin in a 1961 radio interview says, “Art has to be a kind of confession… The effort, it seems to me, is: If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives…”

“The practice itself is all about learning, looking back on the day (without bias or regret) to contemplate your behavior and its consequences. It requires sitting with yourself, taking an honest moment to think about what transpired, what worked, what didn’t, what can be done, and what can’t. Reflection requires courage. It’s thoughtful and deliberate. Being at the “top of your game” only comes when you extract from your past how to engage the future.”

Creative Reflection 

Every year-end, around the middle of December, when it is pleasantly cold and ample sunny I reflect on my year. What I achieved, where I fell, where I didn’t, what succeeded, what not.

The University of Edinburgh talks about four main creative ways to reflect: Written Reflection; Reflecting with others; in Conversation with self; and Creative media like photography, poems, painting etc. “Reflection will not just happen unless you create the space for it. We will just continue to move quickly from one thing to the next and not stop to reflect and recognize professional growth opportunities.”

The writer of Creativity: The key to problem solving, comments that “creativity is not as an art form or means of self expression, but as a way of solving a problem. That’s what it’s really for. And the fewer options one has (lack of time, lack of budget etc), the more one relies on it.”

And that is what we are doing. We make reflection and artistry affair.

When the shame of failures and falls are stamped inside us we use creative reflection to solve a lot of knots and messes within us. As Harvard folks found out that failures and frustrations turned out to be a place of immense learning and growth and because we can’t control a dime we can at least tame our own wits and give few days to reflect on ourselves and make our lives more manageable. At the least.

The wide-eyed curiosity is what we need.

All of us who, are working an ordinary 9-5 job but can still see an old grandma on the moon or sonnets in the hustling streets full of people, we know we are reflecting creatively. Reflection is going inwards in response to the outward things. And just like the sun shines over the fields and the mountains we too let our sun fall on things within.

For example:

Can you make a story of your failure and narrate it to your friend or your child (just mildly if it is a child)? Did you learn something? Can you draw your feelings, and colour them in the required shade? Or if you can write it into a poem with no right rhyming? Can you sing your experiences in not-so-sophisticated lyrics and pretend no one’s listening?

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”

― John Dewey, American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.

Curious minds who inwardly want to be nosy to the world in a good way can reflect and turn our internal blah-blah into creative reflection and learn from those failures and setbacks. So, when I write letters to you here, I am attempting to make some extra bold steps to move away from the slippery world of urgency and find space for you to sit and ponder on the things that are also crucial for living – one is money, the other essentials are mostly invisible to the eye!

Now to my faves of the week:

To Scroll: With creativity, there is also a set nostalgia. Not the brooding one but about the fondness of what all has shaped our lives. Visit the work of Frank Moth who creates digital collages of “nostalgia and forgiveness in colorful, surreal floral portraits and futuristic retro compositions.”

To End:

LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Hold fast and stay true to all that has shaped you,

– Anugrah