my creative process

There was an experiment done with mice and they were trying to find out how mice grew dendrites in the brain.

They wanted to know what conditions caused the brain to really grow.  So they took one mouse and they put him in a cage and they gave him everything he wanted: food, everything, he had everything.  They put another mouse in a cage, he ha everything, but he had to run in a treadmill.  And then the third mouse, they put him in a cage and twice a week they him out and put him through a maze, but not just any maze, one that threaten his life.  He had to go up this pole and he’d be twenty feet above a tub of water below and well…you know…enough to put a little edge to it…

So they had MRI’d the brains of these mice and after wards they sliced up the brains and to look at the dendrite growth.  Well the mouse that had everything, he didn’t grow a single dendrite.  The mouse that had to run, he grew dendrites, but he didn’t connect them. And the mouse that had to survive, he grew a lot of dendrites and connected them all.

I can look around me, the people I know, the people I’m close to and two people come to mind when I think of that third mouse.  My mother and my grandmother (on my dad’s side).  Let me tell you, they’ve certainly got some dendrites.

You know, in life, when you try, you could fail horribly.  Sometimes I’ll look at something and decide against doing it because it scares the crap out of me.  The thought of failing or not even coming close to what I expect or imagine in my head, holds me back.   But maybe I should start doing the opposite.  Because if it doesn’t even scary me a little, well where’s the learning process/experience in that.  And I believe that facing that uncertainty is actually the creative process.

This…right now, it’s me creatively processing the uncertainty that awaits for me in 2009.