Ya know what I was thinking about today? Nothing.
I put in a full day of work, but I gave my mind the day off. That’s right. I was on something like cerebral autopilot. I had things to do, but they were routine enough and I knew them well enough that they didn’t require creative thought. So, I drifted, dreaming wide awake. It’s my version of creative tension.
The term, creative tension, was coined by Peter Senge in his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. He thought competing ideas in teams and organizations created tension, which he took to be energy that could be applied to resolving uncertainty. But Pete had it wrong and probably should have gotten out more. If he’d worked in any organizations of, say, 10 people or more, he’d have known the only tense uncertainty in such organizations is whether bureaucratic politics would cause those with competing ideas to find themselves on the outside looking in.
My version of creative tension is the energy that exists in the space between what I have to do and what I want to do. But if the tasks I have to do are mundane, repetitive, and practiced enough, I can do both.
Bear With Me
For example, if I have to double-check my bookkeeper’s math on the payroll, state and federal income, sales and use, and corporate taxes I’m required to pay, I can copy and paste the numbers from my bookkeeper into a column in a spreadsheet, highlight the numbers in that column, and use the auto-sum function to tally the total. Simultaneously, I can be thinking about the ad campaign I have to create for one of my clients, after which my bookkeeper will invoice the client, thus generating the payroll, state and federal income, sales and use, and corporate taxes I’m required to pay.
That, of course, creates a whole other kind of tension between having to pay all those taxes — as well as the taxes I have to pay for the property I own for which I had to pay sales tax as part of the process of owning that property — and the reality of eking out a living. The only creative element in that tension is the way in which the government continues to create ways to take the money we’ve earned, including the money we’ve spent on that which we’ve already been taxed. Under those circumstances, then, I suppose dreaming wide awake could be considered a form of escapism, if not survival.
On Second Thought …
Well, okay. Maybe I wasn’t thinking about nothing today. But I was dreaming. Because if you don’t have dreams, all you have is nightmares.
Are you awake?
