Be everything (but don't be too much)

"You must be patient as a sick man and confident as a convalescent; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are the doctor too, who has to watch over himself." The point being that you should be everything -- from a leader to a follower, from soup to nuts, from earth to sky -- because no one else will be everything for you.

At the same time, do not try to overdo your doings. "Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you."

From the wise and double-edged musings of Rainer Maria Rilke in "Letters to a Young Poet".

Lit creativity

Creativity comes in many forms. Here it is lit up in the shape of a pumpkin.

Morphisms

It's funny how we personify objects. This is the king of the jungle. We took our highest-ranking human and gave that name to the highest-ranking tree. This tree has been growing for years. It has witnessed years and years of seasons, of people old and new, of moons rising and falling, of plants dying and growing, of rain and sleet and fire. This tree is history personified. Consider the following thought experiment: what if we turn personification on it's head, and take the traits of inanimate objects and apply them to humans?

Still. Stable. Grounded. Mature. All-seeing. These are pretty good examples of things we may want to be called. Weird, how inanimate objects don't objectify humans.

Fun fact: Chremamorphism is the act of applying the traits of objects to people.

Leave your mark...

...wherever you go. Even if it is in the pins-and-magnet toy in a tech museum.

Step foot on a new mountain -- first a real one and then a metaphorical one. Hug someone who looks like they are having a bad day. Try a new recipe with a twist and keep honing it, if you like it, until you reach your own perfection -- one good dish is better than thirty sloppy ones. Bring your own ideas to the table no matter how silly you think they are -- if they are creative no one can fault you for not being brave and at the least it will generate another great idea. Leave your mark, whatever you do.

Is this a duck?

This is a duck. Viewed from a very weird perspective, but a duck nevertheless.

Availability bias is an interesting phenomenon in which perspective plays an important role. Availability bias occurs when we overestimate the probability of an event because we associate it with a memorable event. For example, death from cancer, intentional self-harm, and a fall is more likely than from a plane crash but because airplane incidents are more heavily covered in the media, people over-inflate their probability and modify their behavior accordingly [1]. As another example, if you know a relative who got food poisoning from eating a certain cuisine, you're more likely to stay away from those foods even though your chance of getting food poisoning remain the same.

Fun fact: Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pioneered the study of availability bias. Kahneman eventually won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the field of heuristics and biases.

[1] National Safety Council Injury and Death Statistics

Incubate

If you let an idea stew on its own while you've stepped away, it's usually suddenly much clearer when you come back. The odd shapes in the picture suddenly look like something real, the darker parts have adjusted to your eyes, and everything finally seems to fit together.

This is the second phase of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. You start out by assessing the problem and gathering information. Then, during incubation, the brain subconsciously processes the information even though you're not actively thinking about it. The thought then reappears into conscious awareness, and finally you validate and verify.

This 4-stage model was presented by Wallas in 1926, but how the incubation phase actually works is still an open question. It's been suggested that the break from conscious thought allows us return to the problem with fresh eyes so that we can restart from being fixated on the wrong perspective. The alternative process is that leaving a task knowing you will come back to it allows the brain to work on it subconsciously in the meantime [1]. In either case, the effect has been happily experimentally noted many, many times. Like Don Draper says to Peggy in Mad Men, "Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it, and an idea will jump up in your face".

[1] Creative People Use Nonconscious Processes to Their Advantage

On the sunny road

How you see the road ahead is completely up to you. Leaves to play in? Dust and dirt? A silent forest canopy to afford you that infinite moment of peace? How you see the road ahead is completely up to you.

This picture reminds me of the song Sunny Road by Emiliana Torrini. Quiet, twangy, cautious, but completely optimistic.