Inspiration from TED

This posting is a simple referral. For anyone in a creative profession, and I'm not only talking about the arts but the sciences as well, I think you might really enjoy these two lectures from TED.

The first lecture is from author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discusses her anxiety over writing her next book, after the "freak success" of her recent bestseller, "Eat Pray Love."

Pointing to a number of authors who were considered "geniuses" and whose creative condition was assumed responsible for their inescapable melancholy or even suicide. Gilbert believes that the problem lies in our perspective. She distinguishes between the constructs of "having versus being genius" and explains that for hundreds of years when someone created a masterpiece you always credited "the muse," or "the genius in the walls" as this theory dissipated, we decided to credit the actual individual and that was where the problem started.

Gilbert explains, "Allowing somebody to think To believe that he or she is the vessel, the fount and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable, eternal mystery is like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun."

Gilbert also touches on others who believe in the concept of the muse, as a force, based on antecdotes from songwriter Tom Waits and poet Ruth Stone.

The second lecture, I'd like to highlight is from a woman named Jill Bolte Taylor a brain researcher who explains what it was like to experience her own stroke. She explains what it felt like when the vessel in the left hemisphere of her brain burst and she narrates each of her thought processes, from trying to move her legs, and trying to decipher letters and numbers, to discovering she's lost the inability to speak. It took 8 years for her to fully recovery from her stroke, but from her perspective the loss was actually a gift.
Bolte Taylor recalls, "Because I could no longer feel the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive ... and it was beautiful."