The World Has Not Stopped Being Interesting
Over the weekend, I returned to the World Maker Faire in the Bay Area. This is my sixth time at this event and my twentieth Maker Faire overall. What keeps bringing me back is the same thing that brought me here the first time: a compulsion to share the love and joy of kites. There is another thing that happens every time I come here, too. I leave with my creative batteries charged, my head full of ideas, and an uncomfortable feeling that I have not been making enough things lately.
I have a crew that comes with me, and in the evenings, after the kids have gone home and we are sitting around a shared meal with some well-earned libations, we decompress. We tell stories about the day. Some are about the snot-nosed kid who sneezed directly on us. Some are about the kid with poor manners. Some are about the helicopter parents. There was the kid who spent what felt like twenty minutes with his forefinger buried so deeply in his nose that we began wondering if he was looking for something. There was the parent who insisted their child could not stand up to color because we don't have chairs in our booth. It is easy to laugh about those things, and we do. But somewhere between the stories, we usually start talking about what we saw.
Over the years, we have learned that one of the most important things we can do when a child is building a kite is nothing at all. The steps are simple. There is no great technical challenge involved. But when a child gets stuck on something, the temptation for the parent standing beside them is almost irresistible. A hand reaches in. The piece gets turned the right way. The step gets completed. Problem solved. Except it isn't. The child has missed the part where they get to struggle with it. They miss the small frustration of not knowing, the experiment that doesn't work, the moment when they try something different and suddenly understand what their hands are supposed to do. We have learned to let them struggle.
Children seem to have a remarkable tolerance for uncertainty. They will try something, get it wrong, try it again, and then wander off to something else without ever deciding that the failed attempt says anything about who they are. Adults seem to have a harder time with this. Somewhere along the way, we learn that being good at something is preferable to figuring something out. We learn the shortcuts. We learn the right answers. We learn which mistakes are embarrassing and which questions are worth asking. We become efficient. Efficiency is useful, but it is not always very creative.
I was thinking about this while remembering Mitchel Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten and his idea of the Creative Learning Spiral. Children come up with an idea, try it, experiment, get feedback, change something, and try again. It is messy and inefficient and wonderfully productive. What struck me at Maker Faire was that I wasn't really thinking about education. I was thinking about what happens to the rest of us after we leave kindergarten. Creativity needs room to wander. It needs time spent doing something badly. It needs following an idea that might turn out to be stupid. It needs getting distracted by something shiny and wondering what the hell it is.
Maybe that is why I found myself thinking about Squirrel.
I have known Squirrel for more than fifteen years. He is in his mid-seventies now, and he has a particular relationship with the concept of getting somewhere on time. At the Maker Faire, I had just parked the car with the whole team inside. We got out, started unloading things, and turned around. Squirrel was gone.
We are used to this. We shut the trunk and start walking. A few minutes later, we spot him farther down the row of cars, completely absorbed in a conversation with a couple. They are fellow makers. Five minutes earlier, they were strangers. We keep walking. We have a booth to set up, things to unload, banners to hang, kites to arrange, and a hundred small things that need to happen before the doors open. It is another forty-five minutes before Squirrel joins us.
We joke about this. We always have. Squirrel gets distracted when we walk somewhere. He wanders off to investigate some new widget. He starts talking to a stranger. He asks questions. He disappears around a corner because something caught his attention. Or so we have always described it.
The morning after the Faire, I was walking along the marshland with Sockeye, and we were laughing about one of Squirrel's wandering adventures from the day before. Then she said, “At his age I want to be like him.”
I laughed, but the sentence stayed with me.
We had spent years treating Squirrel's wandering as a kind of harmless malfunction. Something we tolerated because we loved him. Something we joked about because he was never going to change. But maybe we had been looking at it backward. We saw distraction. He was experiencing curiosity. We saw inefficiency. He was giving himself permission to stop.
There is something uncomfortable about realizing that the thing you have been trying to contain in another person might be something you should have been protecting in yourself. Squirrel has spent decades collecting experiences. He talks to strangers. He asks questions. He stops to look at things. He pokes at unfamiliar objects. He follows conversations down strange little side roads. He seems to have retained something that the rest of us spend years learning to suppress. He still plays.
The children at Maker Faire do something similar. They struggle with the kite because they don't yet know how to do it. They turn pieces around in their hands. They try something. It doesn't work. They try again. Eventually the kite starts to look like a kite. They don't know enough yet to be embarrassed by not knowing. Squirrel is different. He knows a lot. He has decades of experience and enough knowledge to probably solve most of the problems that come his way. And yet he still wonders. The child is curious because the world is new. Squirrel is curious because the world has not stopped being interesting.
And then there is me.
I have found that some of the times I have felt most alive have been when I was struggling with something. Not the big dramatic struggles that we usually talk about when we talk about overcoming adversity. I mean the small ones. The things that don't work the first time. The problem that keeps bothering me. The idea I can't quite get my hands around. Those are the moments when I start playing. I try something. I change it. I break it. I try something else. Sometimes I figure it out. Sometimes I don't. Either way, I have been paying attention.
Maybe that is why I have become increasingly interested in the difference between comfort and engagement. Comfort asks very little of me. It lets me move through a day without being particularly changed by it. Engagement is different. It asks me to pay attention. It asks me to be uncomfortable. It asks me to admit that I don't know something. It asks me to follow an idea without knowing where it will lead. It asks me to play.
And maybe that is what I have been trying to recover in myself.
These dispatches are part of that experiment. Writing one every week is a small, self-imposed struggle. I know they won't all be masterpieces. Some will probably be terrible. There will be weeks when I stare at a blank page and wonder why I thought this was a good idea. But the commitment makes me look differently at the world around me. I pay more attention to conversations. I notice things. I wonder whether there is a story hiding inside a deep conversation with Sockeye while we drive home late at night. I wonder if there is something worth exploring when I ride out to meet someone at a campsite. I wonder about the person sitting next to me in the coffee shop and what kind of life they have lived.
The writing gives me a reason to wander.
Maybe that is what making things has always been about. You start with some pieces scattered across a table. You don't quite know what they are going to become. You pick one up. You turn it around in your hands. You try something. It doesn't work, so you try again. You move something. You take something apart. You put it back together. And somewhere in the middle of that process, you realize you are no longer worried about whether you are doing it right. You are simply making something. Maybe that is what I want to remember as I get older. Not how to become more efficient. Not how to avoid every unnecessary struggle. Not how to know exactly where I am going before I leave.
I want to remain interested enough to stop along the way. I want to be the person who notices the strange widget. I want to ask the stranger a question. I want to turn the pieces over in my hands and see what happens when I put them together differently.
And maybe, if I am lucky, I will still be making kites when I am seventy-five, not because I have figured everything out, but because the world has not stopped being interesting.
BOOK: Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Passion, Projects, Peers and Play - Michael Resnik This book really hit home the first time I read it, and I am reminded of it every time I go back to the Maker Faire. I am always coming back from that event feeling energized, not because of the act of giving away kites, but because I am surrounded by thousands of people that just want to play and share their experience. It is invigorating!
SONG: Finally Moving - Pretty Lights
This song makes me think about play and playing around with the things that are with us. It has a bit of an old age jazzy R&B feel, and then overlay of a fun techno beat, some newer age elements, and still that good walking beat.
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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