image: sense writing sequences from workshops in istanbul and tel aviv. used with permission
In this Summer Lab series, I’m offering ways of reacquainting ourselves with our innate learning processes to meet our creative needs. (If you want to experience this kind of learning right away, you can skip to the Sense Writing gift sequence below!)
In the last installment, I wrote to you about how mistakes help us fulfill our creative needs in an organic, textured way.
And today, I want to show you what that looks like in practice in a context most of us have seen and all of us once experienced.
What a Baby Can Teach Us
As infants and small children, most of us learned how to lift our heads, roll over, crawl, sit and walk through experimentation, reversing, repeating, finding variations, and then choosing the most optimal for that moment.
Our motivation was often curiosity and pleasure. And we did it with all the time in the world.
If I watch a baby learn to walk, however, I might soon notice that many of the movements have little to do with the end result of just putting one foot in front of the other.
Her learning process, to most bipedal adults, wouldn’t necessarily make sense. It would be full of stumbles, and start-agains, and spittle. If I’m watching her, I might offer her a gentle hand or reassure her with my voice that I’m close (and probably chuckle at her toddling).
This is the way most of us learned to walk, in this textured and implicit process that served us well, allowing us to adapt to infinite situations that we encountered as we grew.
But if I’m trying to be “helpful,” and want to advance things along quickly — I might explain to her through praise or command or hands-on direction exactly how she should be ambulating her pelvis or placing her foot heel to toe.
She’d resist, maybe even pushing me away — the natural response of her learning nervous system.
(As she should! Her developing nervous system knows what it needs, even if the helpful grownup doesn’t.)
But if I persisted and managed to interrupt her own way of learning with constant instructions, I could eventually get her to walk quicker… but also a little like the monster in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
She would be going from Point A to Point B, yes. But she’d be missing all the texture and all the navigation in between.
Even if an Expert in the stages of walking could identify the reflexes, transitions, inhibitions, etc. of an “inexpertly” flailing baby, the best help they could offer is still just the lightest support of what is already there. Otherwise, they could interrupt a very specific, delicate, deceptively efficient process that can’t be neatly categorized from the outside.
What a Baby Can Teach Us (About Writing)
Luckily, this kind of interruption doesn’t normally happen with walking — but it happens all the time when we’re learning how to write.
Since we come to school speaking, a pencil goes into our hands and we assume an easy transition to the written word. When teachers or well-meaning mentors focus on writing craft, they often reduce process into a plan: “Know what the character wants” “Increase the stakes” “Make sure the character changes” “Do A, B, and C...”
We don’t get a chance to make our own “mistakes” of discovery or to build our own invisible scaffolding for the choices no one could possibly know to tell us about.
So how do we build that scaffolding for a resilient writing practice when we’re no longer toddlers learning to walk? How do we bridge the lessons our bodies already know to the less contained realms of language and story, where it’s so easy to get stuck in our heads?
In this Summer Lab Series, I’m offering ways of reconnecting to our innate learning processes to meet our creative needs. In the writing and movement gift sequence below, you’ll explore one version of this organic learning (but with maybe a little less drooling than a toddler)!
Through processes that shift the way you see mistakes, we create containers in which we can use exploration, insights, and mistakes the way we used to: as the raw material with which we build our inner maps and find our footing.
(For the Sense Writing sequence below, you just need a notebook, pen, and a place to lie down!)
