Accidental Creative

From August 2-11 I was among three hundred and twenty (320) people from Cincinnati who invaded New Orleans. A seven-bus convoy. Our mission was to partner with Habitat For Humanity in its effort to rebuild sections of the city destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

First was the seventeen-hour bus ride. Call it detox, really. It was my chance to escape for a while, gaze out at the passing landscape and simply forget myself. No agenda, no problems to solve (except how to get comfortable enough to sleep on a bus.)

It felt like we were all in something together.

After an overnight bus ride and a day of relative quiet, one of the first things we did in Nola was tour the region and survey the damage. I was shocked by the extent of the remaining devastation. Entire neighborhoods are still in shambles, teetering on the brink of collapse. In spite of hearing reports from the scouting trip, I was floored by what I witnessed.

On day three we began our labor. Two-hundred and eighty of us were charged with doing the Habitat work, and thirty-or-so of us had the opportunity to hang out with kids who had been displaced by the storm. Many of these kids had lost everything and had only recently been able to return to their homes.

Now on to the save-my-conceptual-soul part. I can’t adequately express what it felt like to get out of bed each day with a clear and simple purpose. Fellow ACer Rob Seddon was also on the trip and said that it was like we were “living the way we’re wired to live.” There was no arguing about what we should do, which direction to go, there was no questioning or solving problems, no moving “big rocks” around (unless they were real rocks.) There was the simple hammering and sawing and moving and engaging and loving kids. That was all. It was simple and it was beautiful.

I love concepts and I love working with my mind. I love solving problems. I love the challenge of it. But as July was coming to a close, I had been neck deep in problem-solving mode for a while. I had huge projects underway in multiple areas of life, the re-work of the AC site is still unfinished, and I was prepping for Nola. (Drowning is the most appropriate metaphor.)

This trip was the concrete answer to my conceptual problem.

There is something that happens when we engage others in generosity and simplicity. As I’ve written before, creativity is simultaneously outward-focused and inward-seeking. We act so that we can re-act. In doing so we recover ourselves from a lifetime of “positioning” and “mask-wearing.” When there are no titles, no bonuses to earn and no extrinsic motivations we are free to purely and simply see the world as we uniquely do and to share that with others as we creatively engage. We are free. And as Parker Palmer says, no act is truly creative unless it is born out of freedom.

So this is my encouragement to you: take the opportunity this week to serve. Do something at personal cost for someone else. Forget yourself for a few hours and lose your masks. Creatively engage.

I was recently surfing the web and I came across something on another website that I’d written to our Premium community a few months ago. (Yes…it was strange to be looking for a quote and to find my own…:)

Life is made up of moments and choices. We can choose to do the small things we must do with great care, or we can choose to stay focused on the “big things” and miss everything in the process. It’s the small, step-by-step, creatively and beautifully engaged act that changes us and ultimately changes the world.

Engage creatively today. Go outside of yourself and then…recover yourself.