Hello! 👋🏽
Welcome to another issue of Long Way Home🏡, where each week I explore a topic related to creativity and emotional intelligence. This past week I've been staying with my brother to help with some renovations and it's been tough to find time for the newsletter. That being said, a commitment is a commitment, so here is issue #36.
Writing under time pressures these past few weeks is forcing efficiency in a new way, and I guess that's the silver lining.
In this week's LWH🏡:
💫 - Creativity is a City by Vandan Jhaveri
🎥 - How the World's Most Complicated Language Works by Half as Interesting
🎙 - The Herd by This American Life
Let’s get into this week’s essay.
Creativity is a City
Away and Alone
In August of 2015, I boarded a plane I didn't want to catch, destined for a country I had never dreamt of visiting. And I had nobody with me.
For my first solo trip, my brother pushed me to make the most out the couple of weeks I had off. He suggested I go to skyscanner.ca, set my destination to Everywhere, sort the search results from cheapest to most expensive, and just go to the place with the cheapest airfare that happened to be the furthest away. Shortly after, I found myself alone in Vienna, Austria, out of my comfort zone and in a world of uncertainty and overwhelming options.
My two-week trip took me across Central Europe. I started in Vienna (Austria), then trained to Budapest (Hungary), Prague (Czech Republic), Cesky Krumlov (Austria), and then back to Vienna for my return flight home. I had never really spent that much time alone before, and I certainly hadn't ever needed to be responsible in that way either. I organized my own itinerary, all my own travel documents, my own lodging and activity bookings and confirmations, and my own budget. It was all me, from top to bottom. And overall, I was proud of how it turned out.
I was, however, overly cautious the entire two weeks. I was so afraid of making some sort of mistake with irreversible, dire consequences. I was deadset on ensuring I wouldn't mess something up the first time I go out on my own like this. I sparingly deviated from my plan, kept spontaneity to a minimum, and would only gingerly, transiently make friends, if at all.
Overwhelming Optionality
Not only was I afraid of losing something important or missing a reservation, I was also afraid of wasting a single precious hour in this new, wonderful world. I never wanted to be distracted from my goal—do all the things I set out to do and have the experience I expected to have.
Despite my fear of wasting the opportunity, all the uncertainty and incalculable optionality would paralyze me, and I would spend some free afternoons and evenings lying on my hostel bed, vegetating on my phone under the never-ending drawl of an ineffective ceiling fan until my next scheduled activity.
So many directions. So many possible outcomes. And I could only ever commit to just one. Sometimes, it was more attractive for me to just opt out and choose none instead.
Creative Spheres are Cities
As I reminisce on this experience, I can't help but see the parallels between being overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of an adventure in a new city and being paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of a creative pursuit.
Any creative or artistic venture is layered, complex, and packed with nuance. The world of visual art can be broken down by time period, geography, subject matter, style, intention, and political climate, just to name a few categories. Each of these could be segmented further into tinier and tinier pieces. It's the same for music production, woodworking, gardening, fiction writing, video game design, and countless other areas. Humans are special—our passions are far-reaching, unpredictable, and deeply personal.
As we get introduced to subject areas, each new idea is its own alleyway with graffitied walls, each new technique is a public park in which we could spend hours, each new creator we discover and want to learn from is a four-storey museum complete with galleries, themed wings, an exhibit under construction, and a uniquely branded gift shop.
With the finite time we have, we must choose our alleyways, our parks, and our museum wings carefully. It's not possible to see and do everything a city has to offer us. Somehow, we need to find the little pockets that light us up and re-energize us.
Many of us get overwhelmed by the sheer optionality and choose to do nothing instead.
It's easier to watch a TV show or scroll through Instagram for 45 minutes or check the news again. Those activities require us to make fewer decisions than deciding which creative pursuit to explore and learn about in a world in which we already need to make hundreds of micro-decisions per day. It's the equivalent of going back to your hostel during an evening in Prague and spending dinner time alone in your bed eating the same microwave pizza you could have had back home.
No MapQuest
Unlike cities, however, creative spheres don’t have maps. It falls on the individual to do research and identify different schools of thought, different seminal artists with whom all budding creatives should be familiar, different books, videos, and other resources that have stood the test of time and are commonly accepted as great starting points to pique curiosity and teach basic technique.
We never know if we're diving into the most fruitful rabbit hole until we've dove down dozens of rabbit holes and emerge with a greater sense of the landscape. Similarly, we never know the best spots to eat in the city, or the best clubs, or the best shopping centres, or the best live music venues until we've decided to open ourselves up to experience.
The difference is that there are maps with points of interest already labelled, with thousands of reviews letting us know whether something is going to be special or not. For creative pursuits, our interest in them are so personal. Other people’s points of interest are rough guidelines at best.
It feels exhausting to begin the exploration of creative spheres though, since it's entirely possible our efforts may lead us down a subpar path, exposing us to poor resources and uninteresting creative outputs, just how we might choose to take a new route back to the hostel one evening and have an utterly uneventful trip. But it's this iteration and bias in favour of exploration that helps build for us a creative landscape by which to judge a creative sphere and understand our preferences.
Until our tastes are more refined and our understanding of the landscape boosts the odds of having fruitful adventures, we might feel like we're wasting our time. But we're not. Finding that local coffee shop we can tell our friends about when they eventually visit this city or making a local friend who gives you great information will mostly happen serendipitously, when we least expect it and once we've gotten into the habit of exploring.
Every City is Your City
Finding what we love, creatively speaking, is a daunting task. The world can feel like an overwhelming, buzzing city in which everyone else already seems to know their way around so well. It's not true. Almost everybody is just stumbling around, unsure of what exactly they're looking for and whether they're even going in the right direction to find it.
No creative sphere belongs to anybody else more than it belongs to us and vice-versa, just like nobody owns a city. We belong here just like everyone else, including those of us who are just visiting.
When it's all said and done, we find the experience we're looking for when we set out of our hostel with low expectations, a sense of curiosity, and a confidence that no matter what happens, we will always be able to find our way back home.
Out on a quest,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri
🎥 - What Would Tolkien Say?
I'm a huge fan of languages. As a writer, I think you need to be. I'm always mesmerized by people who have created their own languages with robust grammar systems and extensive vocabularies. In this video, we learn about John Quijada's language called Ithkuil. I had never seen anything like this before.
If you're interested in how languages are developed and how meaning can be captures in words, you'll find this video fascinating. Check out how the language centres around constructing words by subbing sounds into 15 ordered slots for various phenomes.
🎙 - Bridging the Gap
This episode of This American Life was fascinating for a host of reasons, but the final story of the episode, the one in which Frank Luntz works to change the minds of Trump-voting anti-vaxxers, was riveting. When it comes to political and social issues, it's so natural for us to demonize and invalidate the concerns of the opposing side, but the way that Frank connected with the core concerns of the very people whose minds we need to change on the path to vaccinating the population was masterful.
It takes thoughtful, targeted conversations, in the language of those we are trying to connect with, to make sustainable change. Check out how one man, with a little help from his friends, can change the minds of staunch anti-vaxxers through honest, vulnerable conversation.