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“Creative Work is Play. It is free Speculation using materials of one’s chosen form”
- Stephen Nachmanovitch
热爱 (rè’ài)
In Chinese one might say ‘rè’ài’ to mean a fire inside for a thing… directly translated to ‘hot passion’, it means something closer to a calling. The owner the chess school used that word to frame a conversation about how to nurture talent in a child.
Don’t force it, you have to wait for the ‘rè’ài’ to emerge, it takes time and doesn’t happen on a schedule. In fact scheduling a passion is a great way to kill it before it is fully formed.
I also heard this same attribute of top footballers referred to as Tanacity by the great football coach Arsane Wenger, to which he clarified to mean, “Stamina in your motivation”
I think they were talking about the same thing, a key requirement to performing at a high level. Which left me wondering how tenacious heat build up in some people and not others. I think all of us have a fire, but we don’t always nurture it to become this kind of heat.
I think the difference is in the framing of how we see the time spent with the thing, lets say the thing is ‘Drawing’.
Do we frame the time spent more as an obligation or an opportunity?
If your 10 minutes of practice is only an obligation, the fire will die out. But if it’s an opportunity to play, every time… then the heat will keep growing. Nurture your heat, by treating your time with your thing, as an opportunity to play.
Play is an opportunist pursuit, it is time stolen, word spoken out of turn, a zag when it’s time to zig. You can’t so much schedule play, as make room for it. My recommendations are an Artist Diary and Ten Minutes a day as room to play. And these prompts are toys that you might choose to play with any which way you please.
The owner of the chess school said, don’t schedule practice for your kid, instead make invitations to play, and respond to their invitations to play. I tried it for a couple of days, and truly, she’s been asking to play more, and talking about ideas about the game more. Which is a stark contrast to when practice was scheduled.
How do you transform obligation into opportunity?
TEN MINUTE ARTIST PROMPT
Blob People
I tried a new way of drawing people, in my play time, I’ll show you if you want to follow along.
Start with a blob for the body
Add a blob for the head
And small stumps for limbs, don’t plan the drawing just lat it flow
Extend the libs into hands and legs
finish with some details
Kids are most creative when they are supposed to be doing something else, and we would be too if we allowed ourselves enough margin and didn’t reach for our phone all the time.
Adam Ming is a start up co-founder turned children’s illustrator at 40, he’s illustrated nearly 20 books. He writes generously about keeping a daily drawing habit and the early years of breaking in and working as a freelance illustrator.
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🇵🇹 In Portugal we’ll mostly eat food grown from the garden. Let’s go on a Retreat?