Fear in Context

At the moment I am trying to be more curious about my fears, especially how they hold me back. 


I want that to change in the coming months, but not entirely. 

It’s been said that hatred comes from fear. We only hate because we are fearful. The implication is that if we didn’t have any fear, we wouldn’t have any hate. But when we think about it, this catchphrase must only be talking about a particular kind of fear. 

Like the concept of love, fear is multifaceted and is often more fully understood by its context. 

So a man who fears losing his wife over a meaningless fling is motivated to love her by blocking unwanted advances from a friend. 


An athlete who fears losing everything she’s worked for is motivated towards integrity and refuses a doping programme.



We all Fear

I think it’s impossible to live in this world completely fearless. We can’t escape fear because fear is linked to uncertainty. As creatures, we will always exist with this possibility because we don’t have full control over everything. 


At this moment I am thinking about how certain types of fear hinders a sharper, bolder creativity. Although I still don't know how I will entirely overcome this, I am fully persuaded that working against fear involves leaning into the right kinds of fears.


Nobler Fears

It’s not enough to nip fear in the bud, but to understand the root and replant it in better soil. When we opt for nobler fears, it’s not as if we suddenly gain an unshakable poise. Things can still go wrong, but even if they do, at least we can look back and say that we didn’t waste any opportunities. We tried our best with the wisdom we had at the time. 


Fear of failing ➡️ fear of stagnating and never moving forward.


Fear of being vulnerable ➡️ fear of never building the resilience to face criticism.


Fear of changing (becoming someone I don’t want to be) ➡️ fear of never knowing what a more mature version of me could look like. 

Define and Hone


Once we change our fears to nobler standards, we can define and hone them through asking questions in light of our base values.


Fear of failing ➡️ what is failing, is it simply that some people might not understand what I do? Is it not attaining the standard I set out to? Is it falling flat on my face in front of people? My base value is that it's better to try.


Fear of being vulnerable ➡️ accept that part of this is okay. It’s okay to not want every part of myself shared, even with trusted people at any time. That’s because my experiences are precious, they matter. At the same time, am I so dense that people never really feel they truly know me? Or am I completely different versions of myself in different spaces? My base value is that I lean more towards relational risk.


Fear of changing (becoming someone I don’t want to be) ➡️In some ways, this is impossible. I will always be a mix of someone I want to be and someone I don’t want to be. I trust the Spirit’s work in my life. My base value is that I strain towards maturity.


On Poetry, Honour and Restorative Process

photo from unsplash

Honour isn’t a word that regularly features in our vocabulary. When we do speak it - it brings up images of far away cultures, perhaps ‘shame and honour’ cultures which grate against our sensibilities. Or we might think of doing the right things as something ‘honourable’. Both have strong moral overtones. Poetry honours and honouring is poetic. When it comes to restorative work, poetry can be helpful in giving proper weight to that which has been broken.

But first, a definition: 

honour

/ˈɒnə/

  1. regard with great respect.

  2. fulfil (an obligation) or keep (an agreement).


At its most basic level, conflict arises when one or two people (or groups of people) feel that something important hasn’t been honoured. It could be someone’s perspective or emotions. It could be someone's time. It could be a civic freedom. Most of us are aware that living in reality means that we will always collide with people who are different to us. That’s not the problem. The problem in conflict arises when we feel the sacred aspects of our lives aren’t being treated with proper regard. 

Poetry helps us with this. As Audre Lorde puts it: 

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems,carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Poetry is not a Luxury, 1985 Audre Lorde


A Mess of Misnomers

Sometimes in conflict, the difficulty comes through misnomers. Wrongdoings are not properly named. Someone calls an insult a ‘joke’. Someone calls disregard a ‘relaxed attitude’. Poetry, through the use of metaphor, imagery and other literary devices gives adequate weight to the hurt of emotions because it fleshes out the experience of damage. Part of restorative work is helping all parties see that which is sacred to the other party. 


Some things are easier to accept as universally sacred. If harm is done to the body, we all get that that’s an issue. But if harm is done to legitimate trust, it’s going to take something vivid to bring that to bear for the other person. 


Honouring is also poetic. What I mean is that singling out the sacred in other people’s lives and giving proper weight to their concerns is a way we adorn our relationships. It’s how we see the shape of other people, how we compare where we have similar objects of sacredness and where ours differ. 


Artist, You're Involved

Artist You’re Involved. 

Artists have an eye for seeing in between the cracks and crevices of their surroundings. The beauty we bring comes from centering the ambiguous and the tangential. This is often our happy place, the superpower which brings about fresh change and renewal in the midst of institutional stagnation.

When artists are around other artists, especially younger ones, there’s a strong sense in which we believe the world would be a better place, if only we had people more like us. I of course think the world would be a better place if everyone thought more artistically. But this isn’t the same as saying we need more artists. Artists need to be very much involved with people who are not like them. 

We need to be involved, ‘cause we’re involved

Many artists I know, including myself, struggle with the pace of those around them. We want to consider things deeply, to chew. This is what makes our work amazing. We’ve spent hours thinking about one tiny wood shaving of the universe - maybe something that doesn’t matter to a lot of people. We produce a film, a dance, or a comedy skit in response and we labour over the thing obsessively.


For most of us creatives, to do this sustainably we need to hide away and be a little reclusive for periods of time, working alone or maybe with one other person. We need to maintain the equilibrium that comes with distance. 

But could it be that this tendency is what keeps us from getting stuck into the thorny mess of relationships around us? 

A lot of artists I know aren’t doing their creative work full-time. They’re balancing copywriting or hospitality or care work. Sometimes when they talk about their work outside of their practice, they are internally disengaged. They’ve struck off their colleagues for their political sensibilities, or other quirks. For them, the real world is their creative practice because folks around them are not ‘a vibe’. 

But isn’t this the kind of mindset we’re seeking to shift through our creativity?

And, aren’t we probably in ways we don’t always like to admit it, part of the problem when it comes to relationships? 

When we really think about it, we’re not hovering over institutions like a cherub on a cloud. We’re actively shaping them whether we like it or not. Most of the time, there’s reciprocity in annoyance. In as much as you feel irritable, someone else feels irritated by you. You are someone else’s headache. 


Whether it’s family or workmates, look for threads which link to what’s important to you in your practice. Don’t throw relational mess in the bin so quickly. It is valuable and probably worth sticking out for the long run. And even if it doesn’t end up being so valuable in the long run, it’s always an opportunity to better understand your own triggers and fears. 

Real Work, on the Ground

At the same time, how do we manage our frustrations with people who struggle to see the inherent value in artistic perspectives? Understand and be realistic with the voice you’re bringing to your team or workmates who have likely never spent a long duration of time in the contexts through which you so naturally move. Understand that your work is on the ground - but only if it is connected to and framed in a way that’s accessible for your community. lf your community is mainly other artists - then you have an easier ride. 

But if your work community half the week isn’t artists, but other hospital workers, builders or funeral advisors, you have a harder time. BUT you’re in a much more privileged position. You’re in close proximity with other culture makers - just not the ones we ordinarily think of in creative circles. 

One of the things I get asked as I meet new people I work with is ‘do you do this full time?’. One time I responded ‘no’, the person who asked said ‘but isn’t that the dream?’

I kept quiet and smiled. 

At this stage in life, I can honestly say that I hope I never become a full time poet and that’s because I want to be regularly confronted with the world around me, as it is, not just what I wish it would be.

Coming Together Workshop

The other week I ran a poetry workshop on low level interpersonal conflict for Rising Arts Agency at Artist Residence Bristol. Here are some thoughts on this new creative journey.

We all have times when we look back on a conversation and think it could have gone better. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, we realise that we should have spoken up and we didn’t. Or maybe we spoke too quickly and said something we regret.

Mother of Ruminations

I can be a bit of a daydreamer and perhaps there’s no more creative potential in my daydreaming than in my interpersonal conflict. When we ruminate, we drag up situations that have deeply affected us. These thoughts come up and it literally comes from a word that is related to cows churning their food again and again. I’m there, turning the conversation up and over in my head, chewing it, swallowing it, and bringing it up again. It’s a bad habit I have. I’ve gotten better over the years, but it still is my default and I have to put a lot of effort into not taking the going down the rabbit hole of woulda shoulda coulda’s in my head. I want to ruminate less and get to a place where my rethinking of a conversation produces something good. What I’ve realised is the power to take these thoughts and make them into something generative. Something that has potential to bring about healing and even the possibility of reconciliation. 

Mother of Pearl: relinquish control, reclaim agency

Ruminations are a fantasy, a way to control the situation - they are very creative, but they produce bitter, stony residue that gets lodged and leaves us feeling stuck. In my ruminations, I often paint the other person as a shrivelled caricature, whilst I’m more savvy, more confident, more sharp -  all at the same time being incredibly kind and attuned to the intricacies of the situation, because you know, I’m perfect. But this isn’t me in reality, this is fantasy Leeza. There’s a better way, and that usually happens in community, guided by someone who has walked the path of relational pain. I want to produce pearls with my memories of conflict and help others in their journeys. This happens only through being guided through with the right space and time.

Oysters produce pearls as a defence mechanism and need two things to do this: time and to rightly identify the threat. They’re are able to take an irritant, such as sand or even a parasite and wrap that intrusion in something called nacre. This is the iridescent substance which, when layered on top of each other, forms a pearl. 

We can do the same, but we need time and to properly identify the threat in our relationships. Ruminating with no creative guidance keeps us stuck and hinders our ability to properly identify what the real threats are.

I believe part of what it means to be human is to properly understand our God-given agency. I distinguish control from agency. Control has to do with establishing the boundaries of reality and setting the rules of life. Agency has more to do with making meaningful choices within the realities we find ourselves and influencing our environment. Inasmuch as we’d like to think we’re in control, we’re not. We’re thrown into families we didn’t choose, bodies we didn’t choose, societies we didn’t choose and a whole host of other variables which make up who we are. But we always have agency. The moment when we grasp for complete control of a situation, like through ruminating, we denigrate our agency and lose an opportunity to create something beautiful. 

I get this idea about agency from the Christian story of Eden. Whilst Adam and Eve weren’t in control, they had God-given agency. God told Adam to name the animals, which is a creative act of agency. God could have named the animals and told Adam what they were, but he gave Adam the dignity of naming things. What an amazing privilege! 

So, back to poetry and conflict. Let’s make pearls of our pain - creatively and communally. 

 

Wisdom and Creativity

Wisdom, like humility, is difficult to grasp because we generally have different perspectives when we talk about it. For example, we sometimes think of wisdom being personified in an old man in a dim library with a cigar, or it could be in a young person who is careful with their finances and saves a lot. 

One thing is clear, often when we talk about wisdom we emphasise things that we do. 

But the wisdom I explore here primarily is a way of being. It overflows out of character, habit and ethics.

From my reading and thinking about this, the most helpful way to think about someone who is wise is that they are in sync with reality.

An area where wisdom shines brightly is in interpersonal relationships. In fact, the wisdom I’m talking about here could not be gained in isolation. A bit like love, it requires relationship with others to be able to grow and to test whether it’s genuine.

The ability to know what’s really going on

Aren’t we funny as human beings? We say one thing, but our tight lips say another. We leave out important information which, if it were the other way round, we’d really want to know. We say we’re okay, when deep down we’d really love for someone to see that we’re not. The wise person understands human relationships and has the ability to properly assess what is going on beneath the surface. Wise people have this superpower which enables them to sift through interpersonal data and make sense of things as they truly are. 

This is so key in the creative arts and it’s especially needed when it comes to creative community engagement, precisely because we as arts practitioners hit deeper realities of human existence quicker than other types of work. We work with people who bear their souls, recreate their lived experience and use their voice to drive forward political ideals in a way that those working in the transport engineering sector don’t. We get to issues of ethics and values quicker and have the privilege and responsibility to hold those precious things in honour. 

So if we’re going to have success in creativity, we’re going have to get clued up on how people are wired, both in the sense of how they are as individuals and also common human experience. And we do this by being attentive, curious and by asking good questions. 

Wait, aren’t these inherently creative acts, don’t they by necessity require us to engage our imaginations? Yes they are  - so let’s leverage them.

The ability to move in the direction of good ethics

Wisdom in interpersonal relationships also involves the ability to know what to do or say next, if anything. But this is all in the context of moving towards good ethics, which can be challenging to figure out. Without getting too philosophical and meta, there’s a sense in which the wise person keeps their eye on the macro as well as the micro. This of course is a big task - but from my experience the wisest people in this sense have the ability to intuitively keep the bigger picture in perspective.  

When it comes to creative work relationships, wisdom involves sensitivity to peoples’ quirks, but also keeps the vision of what needs to happen to get things done, and in a way that as much as possible, everyone involved is satisfied. 

This is why, in my experience, producers are the wisest people in the sector. They’re on the ground, relating to many different kinds of people, they are often very emotionally attuned, but are grounded enough to keep their eye on the end goal. They’re the ones diplomatically managing expectations, reminding people of deadlines and budget limits, all whilst maintaining an approachability that masks just how stressed and overloaded they really are. If you’re on a project with a producer and they’re doing a great job - tell them!

Faith and Creativity

Almost everything we see as admirable and as excellent at one point didn’t exist. For something as simple as a ballpoint pen, László Bíró after many attempts at trying to fix the inky inconveniences of the fountain pen, had the faith to persist - to keep going in his quest for a better alternative. Then one day, he was inspired by a child playing with marbles in a puddle. He was struck by the watery trace the marble left behind, made the mental connection to previous versions he had made, and the ingenuity of modern ballpoint pen was born.

Creativity requires faith. It requires the ability to see the fuller potential of raw material; pen and paper, clay and spinning wheel, isolated notes and melody. The very act of envisioning a creative idea involves pulling of scraps of memory and desire, ache and frustration. It does this by contorting and stretching it into a resolution or aim that doesn’t yet exist.

My favourite quote on faith is one from the bible. The writer says:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

But perhaps more fundamentally, faith requires creativity. A visual demonstration of this is the stretching of an elastic band and holding it taut. Faith is a stretching of our imagination and holding it in that position of tension over a period of time. Its integrity is tested, which essentially requires creative thinking to be able to remember previous successes, adapt, give the benefit of the doubt in difficult relationships and take advantage of the benefits of hindsight which are currently unfolding in real time. Faith is inherently imaginative. It takes scraps of memory, mental images from previous encounters and reworks them into a new image. In essence, faith is a stretching of our imaginative resources.

There’s an interrelated relationship between faith and creativity

The same chapter from where this verse is from lists multiple examples of where this creative stretching took place. The writer concludes:

‘These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth’.

What does greeting something from afar look like in practice, other than a kind envisioning which is stretched? I imagine these individuals squinting in the distance, tensing their chest and eye muscles in hope of something better to come.

But what blocks faith? Often, people talk about fear - and rightly so. But fear only blocks faith via the route of imagination. Fear is just as imaginative as faith, but it conjures up phantoms and fantasies of annihilation, rather than resolution.

Within this stretching, there is inevitable tension. There’s a pulling and a discomfort within the process. Faith is creativity with tensile strength. It encompasses resilience, malleability and is tested and strengthened over time.

This has become a core value to my creative practice because so many other good qualities are contingent on it. For example, without faith I cannot have the emotional resources to combat setbacks and disillusionment. I need faith to be able to push forward when I feel uncertain about a new partnership, and trust that if things don’t work out, it wasn’t pointless. But my faith isn’t arbitrary. I don’t have faith in faith. Ultimately for me, it’s grounded in a personal God who has proved himself faithful over time.


Humility and Creativity

Humility and Creativity

Humility is a funny one… mainly because people view it in such different ways. Unlike the concept of love, calling someone a humble person can have positive or negative connotations. 

Some people view humility as putting yourself down - denying your gifts or deflecting compliments. 

Others view it almost as a spiritual state of being unaffected by the world, as C.S. Lewis famously said: 

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” 

Imagine that - not thinking of yourself at all as the highest form of virtue.

But is that even possible?

I’m made from earth

It’s interesting that the English word ‘humility’ comes from the Latin ‘humilitas’ which is derived from ‘humus’ meaning ‘earth’. It signals being close to the ground - or as we commonly say, ‘down to earth’.

My understanding of humility is grounded in the idea of being a creature. The Latin association of ‘earth’ and ‘ground’ reminds me of Adam being made from clay, something which speaks deeply to our humanity. I am a dependent being, I did not bring myself into existence. For all of my efforts at self sufficiency and perceived independence, I didn’t stride into this world this way. The first full sensory experience I had in this world, touch - is an ode to dependence. 

This understanding of humility helps me to veer away from faulty aspirations of self forgetfulness on the one hand and false deprecation on the other.

Having grown up in Black culture in the UK, I find self effacement as virtue in White British culture a bit of a red herring. Brits don’t like to make a big deal of themselves and have tied moral value to it.

But I wonder whether having no concern for the self leaves us vulnerable to a different kind of pride: saviourism.

Could we, in attempting not to not draw attention to ourselves out of humility, end up thinking we don’t need the attention of others, that somehow we’re above it? Might we have an overinflated view of our ability to handle life because deep down, we actually do believe we are completely okay?

I’m not the saviour

Creativity constantly touches what is most sacred to us requires resilience, but our dedication as artists can turn sour when we veer into saviour mode. 

Humility keeps my creativity in check because it reminds me that I don’t have to be the expert at everything - it helps me see that truly, there’s no such thing as an original work of art and that I need the input of others to thrive. 

Humility helps me see that I am created to be in relationship with others, which is why I can’t just dismiss them if I disagree. It helps me want to meet the needs of others, without fooling myself into thinking I can do this all the time.