There’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has left so many of us feeling stuck with stay-at-home admonitions, frustrated by social- and physical-distancing protocols, and mired in sameness and more sameness. So many of us yearn for a break in the routines and precautions that have taken over our lives. DJ Johnson is here to implore us to find true inspiration in unlikely places.
DJ Johnson comes to us from Providence, RI. He serves on the faculty of the New England Institute of Technology.
I believe in inspiration.
I am a creative person, but I could never have imagined a year like 2020. All of the chaos of it left me feeling a bit flat, stuck.
Dark times call for dark coffee.
My morning ritual is a French Press full of Italian Robusto. Ordinarily, two cups of this will wake up my senses and get my creative juices flowing. Yet, day after day, this failed to rouse me out of my funk. I would feel just as stuck from the first sip to the espresso silt at the bottom of the cup.
I didn’t know what to do.
We all get stuck. As a professor of Design, my day job is helping people get un-stuck. One tool that I use to get people to look at problems differently is called “Squiggle Birds.” I ask the people in the room to draw six random squiggles on a piece of paper and then pass it to their left. I then ask the recipients of those squiggles to turn those random loops into birds. The immediate reaction is a look of confusion and suspicion. Inevitably someone will say something like, “In what world are these birds?” At this point, I step up to the whiteboard, execute a 2D hair ball, and then proceed to draw a little beak, two beady-eyes, little birdie feet, and a small triangle to suggest a tail. The result is a cute little cartoon of a bird that brings a smile to every face. Instantly, the people in the room begin madly converting chaos into flocks of joy. They are unstuck and ready to raise phenixes from their ash.
This is what I needed for myself; I needed to turn my chaos into art.
So, this one morning, I got down to the silty end of my cup, and instead of rinsing it out in the sink, I poured the dregs onto a paper towel. It was a deep brown splatter of random puddles. It looked like a disaster, an abject failure. I stared at it for a few moments, and my perception of the shapes began to transform. I grabbed a marker and outlined the contours, and soon a butterfly emerged, and so too did my smile. The funk was gone.
I believe life requires us to stop seeing only stains and to start looking for inspiration.
