While most families get together on holidays to grill, drink beer, watch ballgames, snipe at each other and dredge up past grievances, our niece and her family sat down in the back yard to play with scraps of wood and bits of found treasures. The French word for this is bricolage--play with what's at hand.
Sophia, so aptly named for this blog, the youngest member of the family, lounged with the dog while all the adults made birdhouses. Some more fanciful than others.
I wanted to share this birdhouse with you because I believe it’s a metaphor for what ...here he comes again...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the transcendent self. The “T” people. Imagine a family so creative, so loving, so thoughtful as to surround little Sophie with these concrete examples of complexity. Yes, complexity.
Complexity doesn’t necessarily mean complicated. A fern is complex.
A mouse is as biologically complex as an elephant. Complexity knows no size. We’re all complex—we just don’t usually remember how complex we really are.
Our two year old granddaughter Josie holds a colorful shape until she’s finds the star shaped hole, the circle, the square to put it in. They fit! It’s the very complexity of this challenge that holds her interest. I’ve seen other children (and adults for that matter) pick up any piece, pound it through any hole, assuming brute force will make it fit. It doesn't, so boredom and entropy set in and they quickly lose interest and walk away.
Mihaly says, when you have a choice, err on the side of complexity. Easy actions lead to boredom. TV watching, for instance. Complexity generates aliveness. When people are bored they fall into entropy—deadness. When they are challenged by, say making birdhouses out of bits of scraps, they come alive. To contribute to greater harmony, he says, a person’s consciousness has to become complex—and that’s not only a matter of intelligence or knowledge.
David Bohm,that physicist everyone loves to quote when thoughts turn to how things fit together, said that we are all uniquely different but it’s the complexity inherent in each of us that creates a coherent society. Complexity creates a stable form. When Vaclav Havel described the Czech society he believed it had swung too far toward simplicity and people’s creativity and complexity had been stifled.
Chaos theory tells us that when things seem to have become extremely complicated, a simple order may be just around the corner. And when things seem too simple—watch out!
This birdhouse seems, on the surface, to be a simple little construction. But take another look.
In his book, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium. Csikszentmihalyi says transcendent people have learned to derive spontaneous joy and deep satisfaction from living their lives. Not from gaining riches or honors, but from the very process of living.
I wouldn’t have known of this book had my friend Dan Hanson not mentioned it to me in a recent e mail. He uses it in his classes—a natural for discussion and dialogue since each of the 10 chapters ends with four or five powerful questions. The book is in two parts: The Lure of the Past and the Promise of the Future. Dan likes to ask his students, "Who are the “T” people in your life?"
“T” people seem filled with joy, even in spite of challenges and what others might call hardships. “T” people have the ability to invest their psychic energy in the future. Sophie doesn't look like the type of person to be lured by the past—or fake pasts as many critics now seem caught up in and spend endless time and words valiantly trying to re-varnish, regurgitate, and recreate.
Just imagine what Sophie will be able to accomplish—and what sorts of birdhouses she and Josie and all their other “T” friends will build!
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