Play and Delay
'Tomorrow!' cried Toad. 'I will do it all tomorrow!'
That's when I do everything.
But what if Elvis is right and ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’?
I would like to write something in favour of playing and delaying, two things I excel at.
Creativity can easily be stifled. I was told repeatedly at school that ‘we don’t do things this way.’ Not in school, not in wider society. ‘Confused and fragmented. Why don’t you just follow the order in your notebooks,’ my history teacher wrote underneath one of my essays, ‘it’s so much easier.’ That’s how easily creativity gets stifled at school. I had seen the order in my notebooks, how could I not, seeing as I wrote them? I thought that this was mere copying and repetition, but it seems that that was precisely what was being solicited and rewarded. I was simply trying to say something different and something worth saying. So, of course, I made it difficult for myself and for my exasperated teachers. I was disorganised and hence unable to express my views in a comprehensible way. Order, structure, and discipline are required. But an originality born of creativity is also valuable. There has to be a point or a purpose to an activity, an added value, something that transcends the frame and the structure. I had an innate, unconscious tendency to rebel against the system, for the reason I couldn’t follow orders. I couldn’t follow the rule-book and therefore had to write my own.
‘If I ran a school, I’d givethe average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I’d give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they had learned from them.’ (Buckminster Fuller).
Creativity is a skill that is more innate than acquired. Rather than teach creativity, it is more important – more creative – to show people how they can approach tasks in such a way as to enable their innate creativity to emerge, flow, and flourish. That often means creating a protective, sealed space around yourself to prevent interference and interruption. I am a writer and a thinker. I think as I write. My thoughts and words pour out in a continuous flow. I am always building something up in my head and on paper or on the screen, full of different strands and parts which link together in some way yet to be discerned and established. Working out the interconnections is a fluid continuous process of branching out. The process is short-circuited by force, by pressure, and by interruption. Every time there is an extraneous intervention, the fluidity of interconnection is lost and the patterns in the process of being established are broken up. The scaffolding and structure you are building in your mind collapses, forcing you to go back and try to re-create your journey from whatever vantage points you can place in your memory.
It should come as no surprise to learn, then, that I was always very remote, taking myself to my room and shutting myself away for long periods. I would refuse to answer the front door and refuse to answer the telephone, which earned me the reputation of being awkward and anti-social. My parents were clearly worried that I had become withdrawn to the extent of being reclusive. The truth is that I was seeking a space in which I could work without interruption and explore my creativity without interference. Instinctively, I had done precisely the right thing for creative people to do, which is to create a world of my own within which I could work in my own time and space.
You hear a knock on the door, or the doorbell ring, you hear the telephone ring, and you ignore them. The problem is, though, that the intervention still disturbs you, because you start to think about who was calling and why. And you always think the calls were important, imagining all manner of consequences. In no time, you have lost your trail of thought and are tasked with re-creating where you were. This is something that ‘normal’ people adjust to normal patterns of communication find incredibly difficult to understand. These are the people who make the regular calls. Their calls are so much more disruptive now in an era of electronic communication. I have very occasionally been involved in collaborative projects with others and they have rarely worked well, as in never. I need to be left alone to work, to think, to allow the creative process work its magic. People who think they are doing no more than keeping in touch don’t realize that every communication they send my way works like a spoke being poked into a wheel. It’s not the time that is the problem, but the encroachment of extraneous information into the creative space. The intervention breaks my thought-processes, has me thinking of things other than the structure and pattern that was being erected and spun in my head, and makes me incredibly frustrated and angry. This entails a massive waste of creative energy on something sterile – the calls are rarely important, especially when they come from people who are ‘just checking in,’ as one would-be collaborator kept saying, as I struggled to create order out of the mass of materials I was working with. Annoying. Always, this leaves me to break off relations to others.
It was made very clear tome, at a very young age, that I did things very ‘differently.’ Of course, in failing to follow simple orders and instructions and do things the way others did them, the way I was expected to do, my ‘different’ way was condemned as the wrong way. I always thought I was in error and, as a result, developed a personality which tended to anticipate problems and difficulties, even impossibilities. It would, however, be wrong to describe me as a ‘can’t do’ person, more of a ‘can’t do it that way, I have my own way’ person. It is clear I am a remarkable ‘unorthodox’ person in the approach I take to tasks. I have never remotely been austere, trusting to the goodness in each and all, should a world of dogmatic belief, customary expectation, and militant self-assurance ever step back to give that goodness space to breathe and grow.
My motto is “Play and Delay,” or “Play and Procrastinate,” whichever sounds better. I should have a crest of arms made bearing that motto in Latin, should I ever work out what that is. I have ‘procrastinare’ for procrastinate and ‘mora’ for delay. Which gives ‘ludere ac procrastinare’ or ‘ludere ac mora.’ I rather like ‘ludere ac procrastinare.’
My approach may strike people as daft or irresponsible, postponingissues, ignoring immediate demands for my attention, and putting things back, but there is a definite logic behind it. The suspension of time involved in delay allows time and space for creativity to happen and flow in whatever direction it the daemon takes it. Instead of foreclosing on myriad possibilities and short-circuiting the creative process by speeding in haste to some goal or deadline, the person who delays keeps all options in play to the very last second, exploring every last possibility contained in everything of interest. This is precisely how creativity works, playing around with things regardless of the tyranny of the clock, and letting the subconscious work too – creative people are in touch with the deep unconscious. Creativity thus involves sleeping, relaxing, playing, and exploring all possibilities and eventualities until coming to good decision. Rush to a deadline and you may miss an awful lot of essentials, and have to do it all again and a lot more besides.
The Welsh motto on my cap reads ‘Araf deg mae mynd ymhell,’ which translates as ‘go slowly and go far.’ (The phrase is pronounced thus: Ah-rav deg my mihnd um-hell).
I was once dismissed as a ‘mere ponderer’ on social media. I rather like that description (without the ‘mere’). I think a ponderer is quite a good thing to be. We live in an age of constant activism, with all manner of incredibly busy people forever doing things or demanding that things be done. There is absolutely no evidence that this approach actually makes things better and quite a lot of evidence it makes things much worse. ‘If it isn’t broken, then keep fixing it until it is.’ I’m not much of a fixer. I like to slow down and take my time; I like to ponder, play around with things, explore eventualities, outcomes, and endings. I don’t see how this is a bad thing, however much activists have accused me of being a ‘posturing do-nothing’ and ‘idle intellectualizer.’ Many years on, said activists are still telling us that it is ‘time for action,’ still telling us that their one big idea is the breakthrough that the world needs. Such people hastily draw a conclusion and then waste their energies demanding that others act on it. I would suggest that they have missed the much greater range of possibilities that is available. A mere ponderer sees that range on account of having surveyed the entire landscape outside of the pressures of any timescape. The important point to grasp is that when you delay you still know that there is a deadline. You are not idling at all, int he sense of wasting time, but processing all the information available to you imaginatively and creatively. You are not ignoring the deadline but using all resources at your disposal to get there, exploring all possibilities in the process. And you tend to make the right decision in the end, being both older and wiser.
I shall end on this: scientists have discovered that it takes approximately 200 repetitions to create a new synapse in the brain, unless it is done in play, in which case it only takes 10 to 20 repetitions. (Thanks to Karyn Purvis for this observation).
In which case I shall keep playing as I delay.
Ludere ac Procrastinare
