Occasionally, an author does it for me.
    A fictional character going through a particular set of circumstances, is … well… that’s me! Certainly, the objective details are different. And perhaps I wouldn’t have done what the character did. But I too had lived through that self-same perplexity of the human condition. Once I recognize it, the entire novel takes on a deeply personal meaning. And my own life story makes more sense, too. 
    I’ve just finished a novel about the early life of a person growing up in the 1950s as an Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn. The dramatic tension throughout the novel is one that I’ve lived my entire life. And while the author’s skill is clearly evident from a writerly point of view, there’s something else there ... something that transcends effective storytelling. It’s the author’s grasp of human nature.
    This subjective identification also comes to me with classical music. Often while listening I’m overtaken by a nexus of sound that exemplifies what I feel inside. Hearing it outside of me, I feel it more strongly within me. A friend recently asked me to recommend a piece of classical music, something moody and dark. Immediately, the Mozart Requiem came to mind, a go-to of mine. Even though I typically eschew music with words (thankfully, the text of the Requiem is in Latin so I don’t get distracted by it), and I’m not much for doctrine and churchiness (as a Mass, it’s not a church practice I grew up with) that piece of music expresses my own sense of moody-and-dark in a deeply moving way. 
    
On the Wilton’s Reads page of this website you’ll notice I alternate reading fiction and non-fiction. Trained in science, I have a head for numbers. I really enjoy books that tell me something about the world in that way. There’s something to be said about the value of an objective analysis. 
    But within fiction a different, more intimately valuable, something emerges. I connect to the subjective me, my intentions, values, awe and perplexity. It is there, written by authors skillful in conveying the human condition through their characters and plots. In reading it I’m not so alone (or weird). Or maybe I am, that weird part, but it’s more okay.
    Non-fiction tells me about the nature of the world. Fiction tells me about what it means to be in that world.
    
I was embedded in the field of professional psychology for four decades. Doing that work I had direct engagement with the human condition. Confusions, frustrations, sad stories and celebrations walked into the office every hour on the hour, spoken into the intersubjective space of our conversation. I often subjectively experienced my client’s emotion as their story was told. It felt magical: my mind and brain in a dynamic, sensing connection with my client. Their stories also invited me to reflect back on times in my life when I faced a similar circumstance or emotion. In the therapy office I had my own subjective humanity as did the client.
    Unfortunately psychology, as a science and a profession, has chosen to focus on the human condition as it can be objectively known. Research turns behaviour into numbers and runs those numbers through sophisticated mathematics. In doing so, it claims to know what really is real about the human mind. Transposed into the clinical office, objectification rewrites struggles and suffering into symptoms, counts them up and targets them with treatment procedures.
    The objectification focus ramped up over the course of my career. Diagnosis has elaborated itself to fill a 1000 page tome of criteria and process. Therapy has become about enacting protocols, more and more of them. Ethics has become about compliance to a burgeoning collection of codes, standards and guidelines.
    But this approach to human distress and adaptive difficulties comes with a price. With the focus on objectification, professionalism replaces compassion, knowledge and skills replace wisdom and intuition, ethical rules define, regulate and limit how respect and dignity are to be shown. Certainly, I’ve known many individual psychologists who are compassionate, wise and intuitive. However, the institutions of the profession have chosen not to nurture those qualities in their practitioners nor value them in their model of competence. 
    Think about it: what happens within you when you’re treated as a number or an object? Are we not apt to become less healthy, less sane, less happy, less well-adapted when we are treated that way?
        
And so, I’ve retired. I made a clean break from professional practice to take up creative pursuits: composing and intentionally listening to music, writing fiction and reading it. In reading fiction I get the other half of the story, the subjective half. I read for when an author whispers to me this is the dilemma of it all, this is the perplexity of human nature, and you are not alone in experiencing this. Once I no longer listen to music as background or entertainment, I’m able to hear myself within it. 
    Many would look at my career as a psychologist as a great success. Objectively, it was. Over and over folk gave me feedback that I had helped them. I was respected by my peers, well, some of my peers anyway. For twenty-five years I was tolerated as a columnist in a newsletter for psychologists. I made enough money in the private sector that I could retire to enjoy a comfortable and creative life for the remainder of my years. 
    But of course, that’s only half the story.
    My career was riddled with all those times I was so completely engaged with a client that psychological thinking disappeared from my mind. What remained was my heart and soul in relationship with another human being. I believe those were the moments I did the most good, moments when I brought to therapy my subjective self as well as the objectivity of the profession. 
    As deeply satisfying as is that book about the Hasidic Jewish boy or loosing myself in Mozart’s Requiem, those moments in the therapy room were even more so.

There’s a telling line in my novel Dead Daffodils. An artist, the grand-aunt of a little girl who is emerging as a musical prodigy, speaks to the girl in front of her paintings on display in the gallery. Listen to what Auntie Leanne says: Nothing in art ever happens all at once. People look at my painting, or listen to your music, and think, well, that’s that. But it’s never just that.”
      A work of art (be it a painting, piece of music, or novel) can seem to have arisen from a spasm of inspiration and creativity on the part of the artist. However, it takes a lot of hard work to get that artistic creation into a form that can intrigue or delight. A song I play in two and a half minutes at the coffee shop evolved over weeks at the practice keyboard. Harmonic structures, phrasing and rhythm had to be developed to embrace and support you as you hum along with the riffs. There was a great deal of error in the trial-and-error process: harmonies went a-wandering without resolution and tempos didn’t mesh. Until, finally, they did.
      There’s a good chance that in reading a portion of one of my novels a sudden smile will pull at the corners or your mouth, or a tear might come to your eye, or your brow may furrow, or a sense of disgust will curl your upper lip. That brief spasm of emotion coursing through you came as a result of dozens of rewrites and edits.
      I share conversation about the creative process with an artist friend. Recently he spoke of the problems that he had to solve as he worked on a painting. Looking at the painting I’m compelled by the elements that were once the problems, seeing them as they finally ended up. Skill, and diligence and patience went into solving those problems. But my artist friend is clear that the key issue is not how the problems were solved but the why of the painting. It is that why that compels the work to find the how. I invite you to marvel at his beautiful work by following this link: https://www.stevemitts.com.
      At the coffeeshop I get a chance to answer the question why when it comes to my music. There, with the smell of the brew and the bustle of people coming in for something other than music, I get to watch people respond to my jazz. I fade into the background for most of the patrons as they pursue their table conversations or phone scrolling. But I also notice some folk intentionally listening. I read their emotional response by watching their faces. What occurs to me in that moment is they’re feeling what I felt in the creating of the piece, my perplexity or delight or melancholy or curiosity. When that listener connects to my music I’m not so alone with my emotional self. And neither are they with theirs. 
      I refuse to play covers, standards or perform music that has already been all written out. Somebody else, be it a composer or arranger, has already done the work of that piece. Similarly, I don’t write in established genres, the plug-and-play approach to plot lines and character types. I don’t because someone else has already solved the problems, given their answers to the nature of human nature. 
      When I have to find my own answers, to grapple with my own why of doing a creative work, I better understand myself and the world around me. The irony or the pathos you as a reader experience as plot elements unfold around my characters tells you something about what I’ve noticed about human nature. Then as you come to the resolution of a novel the illusive why might emerge for you, the sense of what it’s all about. And in that, we will be together.


Spending decades as a psychotherapist, I eschewed standardized thinking about human suffering and wellness. My field wanted me to think in terms of making an accurate diagnosis and then applying the most scientifically proven treatments. It wanted to do the work of figuring out what should be done quite separate from me and my client. I was just supposed to apply best practices. All the creativity and critical thinking was the purview of someone else.
      The equivalent in music would be playing covers, or performing music already set out in notation. In literature it would be writing pulp fiction. In art, paint-by-numbers. 
      Over the course of my career, a comprehensive manual of mental health diagnosis elaborated itself over successive editions to become a 1000 page tome. Human suffering was reduced to objectively defined symptoms. Diagnosis was accomplished through symptom counting and decision trees. Years of research and consensus building went into laying out the proper process to get the right diagnosis.
      But the etymology of the word diagnosis is working through (dia) awareness (gnosis) not through knowledge. Awareness is personal knowing rather than intellectual knowing. I came to knowing-awareness by entering the intersubjective space with my clients, appreciating them for their unique histories, perspectives and perplexities of circumstance. To truly bring my clients’ needs into my awareness, I didn’t need to count symptoms but I needed to know what counted in their lives. 
      My profession wanted psychotherapy to be the diligent application of treatment protocols. It was something I was never very good at. Instead I worked to find with my clients what worked for them, for their solutions to be their own rather than that smarts of some therapy developer working out steps to be followed.
      In this approach to the therapy room I found the why. It was about discovering meaning, sanity, and functionality in the context of human relationship.
      I treasure the intentional listener in the coffeeshop. I get excited when a beta-reader really gets the theme and human-nature perplexity in one of my works of fiction. It’s so like the therapy office: meaning, wisdom and wellness found together. That sharing of human experience is what makes something beautiful.

There’s a good chance you will be reading this during the darkest three weeks of the year. 
​      The regulating pathways in my brain are thrown into a tailspin by these dim, shortened daylight hours. I get achy, my vitality runs down.
      One of the ways we cope with the dark is through cultural and religious observances. There is the lighting of the Menorah. A dark stable is brightened with the birth of a baby, the first appearance by one who would be later identified as the Light of the World. Even Santa’s beard is snowy white. Eaves are garlanded with colourful lights. In churches or malls crammed with human humidity we hear music in major keys. And as meaningful and delightful as these things are for some, at this time of the year I just don’t have the energy for them. 
      We think of darkness as something to be resisted: throw some artificial light on it or add in a cultural observance so we can get through. But I posit darkness is vital within the human condition, not something to push away. Our times of personal darkness can be the crucible for turning knowledge into wisdom, for rising above reactive engagement to act instead with perspective, compassion and grace.
    
At the coffeeshop my music contains many dark elements. There are dissonances and harmonies in the minor keys. And of course, there are all of those irreverent blues notes. My hope as the creator of these darker musical elements is that they calm, allow for a moment of reflection, and ease off the pressure to do and to be. But that only works if side-by-side with those dark elements I also provide an accompanying harmonic resolution. 
    My novel An Incoming Tide is a study in human evil. There are murders. The remnant psychologist within me identifies within the cast of characters three personality types that do harm: the narcissist, the psychopath, and the opportunist criminal. Pretty dark, eh?  
    But currently inching toward publication is the sequel novel, Dead Daffodils. Its focus is on healing, healing that emerges from within when wounded characters are supported by intentionally caring others.  
    
I spent four decades professionally in what often begins as a dark place. The psychotherapy room is filled with stories of harm done by one person to another. I’ve heard of evil in war zones and abuse in Canadian families. Workplaces are often injurious with their internal politics and objective-driven management styles. 
    But, how does interpersonal evil arise?
    Historically (from the 7th Century) the list of seven deadly sins has itemized lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Even though the items in that list of sins would indeed breed emotional and interpersonal ill-health, they are not the foundation of harm to self and others that I heard in my psychotherapy office.
    What came to haunt me in the therapy room were the stories of self-indulgence at the expense of others and the striving for power and control. Foundational to those damaging behaviours were attitudes of entitlement and arrogance. This is our dark side now. It is manifest on the micro level in our families and workplaces as interpersonal abuse. It is evidenced at the macro level of society through tribal politics with its animosity toward, and disqualification of, others. And even though religion preaches the light, often it contributes to the very darkness it was intended to disperse.
    Each of these dark sides creates its own craving. Once one believes they are entitled, they then feel entitled to more and more. Similarly for arrogance, for personal indulgence, for greed, for power over others. Slide down that slippery slope of thinking you deserve more than the next guy, that you are right and they are wrong, or that you are better than, and soon you will never be satisfied or secure.
    But you will be doing harm. 
    One of the lessons I learned in the therapy room was that we, as social creatures, injure ourselves when we do harm to others. That injury, anesthetized at the time of its occurrence by a paroxysm of power, superiority or satiation, ends up warping our character and identity. The spirit and soul we have within is damaged. In coping with the pain of that self-inflicted injury we seek more doses of entitlement, arrogance, self-indulgence, power and control. The cycle intensifies. Its long term consequences are bitterness and brokenness.
    For me, the therapy room supported healing by being a place of intersubjective understanding and acceptance rather than one of arrogance. It was a place intent on promoting the wellbeing and wellness of the client rather than the healer seeking to gain personal benefit at the client’s expense. It was a place of generosity in the giving of one’s compassion for the suffering of another. And even though a healthy professional relationship still has a fundamental element of interpersonal power it avoids exploitation and abuse, seeking to keep the client safe from harm. Through that safety, the client learns to keep themselves safe in the rest of their life.   
    I had the privilege of being a part of this healing context for four decades. Now I seek to bring a sense of wellbeing, wisdom and respite to others through my music and writing. It’s not about happy-happy, like the garland of lights on the eaves, but about being a companion within a world that has dark elements. Each dark, dissonant musical note I play in the coffeeshop says I feel that too, just like you do. Then each musical resolution says but we can be okay. The evil of harm-doers in fiction can be balanced by the healing that comes to characters in a context of loving and just relationships. 
    Yes, it’s dark now. But soon the days will begin to lengthen, to get brighter and warmer. The greys and browns will give way to the green. It happens every year. 

There’s something I’m not very good at. Not good at it at all, actually. And being not very good at this one thing, there’s a whole bunch of other things that I can’t be good at either. This important thing, the thing that makes so much else work better, is the way we’re supposed to go about the challenges of life.
      It is about making a plan, and working the plan, and achieving the desired outcome.
      A different approach comes more naturally for me. I start with a vision of what could be. While I'm gradually getting better at the tasks to realize that vision, I see new possibilities along the way. I get distracted by those possibilities, pursue them rather than the step in the process that I should be working at to just get the job done. With the detours along the way the original vision changes, becomes more satisfying. 
      Last summer I painted and put new flooring in our basement. The thing I really like about how it turned out is something that I didn’t even think was part of the job when I first began. It just presented itself as a possibility while I was doing the other necessary things. That side project took a lot of extra time, but I’m glad that I did it. 
      Now, just so you won’t get the wrong idea … it’s not that I’m flighty, undisciplined and lacking in diligence. It’s just that I also notice things emerging around me and pursue the possibility in them.
      Some of you know me from the coffee shop, playing my jazz. All of my songs are original. Every song starts with just noodling around on the keyboard, creating a new riff and finding the underlying chord structures to go with it. But invariably some odd, bluesy, note or atypical bit of harmony crops up. Its emergence attracts me. At first that little oddity doesn’t fit, but as I keep exploring the possibility it provides I can see how it complements the other riffs. Eventually it takes its place, adding interest to the song. 
      And it’s also happened in the novels I’ve written. I typically just start with a premise, context and characters. Usually it’s not until about 2/3 of the way through a piece of writing that I know where it’s going. During the initial writing I’m watching for what emerges with the characters in their context. And sometimes what they do or say surprises me, that I wouldn’t have planned it in. But as the writing progresses, and as the editing polishes, those unexpected directions provide texture and depth as well as contributing to the plot.
      This approach to life of not having a comprehensive plan, not sticking to the steps, not following the straight path to a predetermined goal, well, you might think it would lead to indolence and dissipation, that nothing would ever get accomplished. But, it turns out to be quite to the contrary. I remain engaged and creative, just not tied to a preconceived outcome. I end up with a work process that’s more satisfying and enlivening. 
      So what has taken the place of plan, execute, accomplish?
      Rather than outcomes, I orient to values. It’s a value to find beauty in things and to create beauty in what I do. It’s a value to approach tasks with the intention of doing them well, with my mind fully engaged in the process. When what I'm doing involves others, It’s a value for me to respond to them with kindness and respect rather than to see them as a means of achieving a personal goal. It’s a value to reflect on what I believe and how I behave so that I can maintain a sense of integrity even if it comes at the expense of immediate success.
      I don't always live up to my values, but when I do I'm more content.
      And ... what about outcome? 
      I live with the intention of equanimity. As long as I’ve lived out my values, I seek to accept what happens with grace. If it turns out to be pleasing, great! If it doesn't, I value the teaching that outcome provides for me, how it allows me to better understand my interface with the world around me.

Regular readers of this blog will anticipate that it’s time to leap into a reflection on my previous career as a psychotherapist. 
      The linearity of goal, plan, execution and outcome is endemic within clinical psychology. It is coached in different terms: assessment, diagnosis, structured treatment, case closure. 
      Part way through the career I discovered something. Treating people with respect and compassion from the very first conversation (even on the phone when the potential client first calls in to book an appointment) results in early easing of their emotional suffering. Providing realistic hope and commitment to work together makes a huge difference for person who is struggling to cope, even before the therapist has a full handle on what the client is facing. Pursing these values sets up a relationship that will work better in the long run. Learning about my client didn’t stop when the assessment session was done. Even if therapy went on for a long time, I still found nuances within the unique person with whom I shared the sacred space of the therapy room. When the time came to bring our work together to an end, there was yet another phase of learning. We had the task of finding how to conclude the emotionally intimate relationship that therapy is, to conclude it with contentment and meaning.
      The therapy process was not a linear sequence of stages as the profession posits it to be but one of repeatedly cycling through discovery and nurturing emergent wellness.
       One more thing. 
      Even though I’m not a goal/plan/execute/outcome sort of person, I’m thankful that some people are. I feel it when I drive through a multi-level traffic interchange. I’m totally in awe of the banked bridges and curving lanes. I can never be like those folk who can build such things but I can discover beauty and benefit in what they do. 
      Oh, and by the way. The basement project did get done! It took longer than I thought it would, but that’s okay.

Writing this blog I’m listening to a performance of Bach piano Sonatas. It’s okay, I do that. 
      There’s something different about this particular rendition of the Bach. It’s not metronomically rigid, as Bach is often played. It lives, it breathes, it reveals a Bach who was human rather than just mechanically and mathematically precise. And it says the same about the performer, a young Russian pianist apparently taking the world by storm, Daniel Trifinov.
      Upon hearing this recording (you can probably get it on a music streaming service and might be worth the listen while you read this blog) I find irony, wit, tenderness and, a touch of sarcasm in Bach’s music. I’d never known it was there. The music lays low and then leaps. It is at one moment introspective and then next engaging. 
      But I have a confession to make. I struggle to remind myself that behind each gift of art (musical, literary, visual) is a creator, or a re-creator. In that piece of music, and in that book, and in that painting is the presence of a person using all their intelligence and wisdom to declare to others what they perceive and feel. That person is reaching out to share that perception, that feeling. When I no longer consider the painting, the song, the novel as an object but see it as gift of human connection it helps me to be more human as well.
      Lately I have been thinking about the listeners and the readers gracing my journey as a musician and writer. My listeners and readers sort themselves out … take the coffee shop as an example. Over the course of a Saturday afternoon a couple of dozen or more patrons come in. Most relegate my music to the background, going about their scrolling and table conversations. And that’s okay. Occasionally, someone acts surprised that the music is live rather than through a stereo system. Some people are impressed that I play only original music. But every Saturday afternoon I notice one or two (and sometimes a lot more) intentional listeners. They have a far away look on their faces as they orient toward my piano. I see flickers of emotion cross their faces, emotion that I’m feeling as I play and was distilled into the creation of the piece. They have set aside the clutter of their minds and the cacophony of our culture and let themselves enter wordless relationship with me. 
      In the connection with that intentional listener I am less alone in the universe. I am less bothered by the cacophony of too much else that wants to intrude. In that connection a sense of what it means to be human breathes through.
      I have some absolutely wonderful folk who support my writing. When they read and comment it is clear that they get it, get the sense of what it means for me to explore the world of relationship and circumstance through my characters. As I write and self-edit, I smile at the sarcasm of one character, tear up at the heartache of another, rail against the arrogance and entitlement of yet someone else. When one of my readers comments on that same humanity emerging within my characters I feel validated. What they perceive suggests that I’ve been able to figure out some of the perplexity of the human condition sufficiently to represent it in my writing. 
      And while creating original music and writing fiction is essentially a solitary activity, the responses of the intentional listener and the intuitive beta-reader lift the whole endeavour to the relational rather than the objective. 

And that takes me back. Valuing the relational over the objective was the theme of my professional life.
      When I was educated in the field of psychology I came through a science orientation. When it comes to human mental and behavioural characteristics we psychologists have prided ourselves in how we can measure things. We have loved reducing the human to the numerical. We valued using complicated mathematical formulas to determine what varied alongside of what and what influenced what. We prided ourselves in taking an empirical (scientific) approach instead of the philosophical and theological perspectives on the human condition that had come before.
      It all seemed to make good sense until I got to the therapy room. There, one-to-one while trying to figure how to deal with a client’s subjectivity in navigating a complex context, I found that the things we knew from the science of psychology didn’t carry the load. Sure, we could know those things for sure (or we thought we did) but so much of that knowledge pales into insignificance compared to the sort of knowing needed to effect therapeutic change.
      Sadly, psychologists are well trained, perhaps overtrained, to consider the human as an object: objectifying life adaptive struggles into mental illnesses, reducing suffering to symptom, objectifying human attributes into personality types. Objects can be acted upon, manipulated to achieve outcomes. Therapists learn powerful techniques to do that manipulation. On the surface it might look like it works. We can even run a little test that demonstrates changes in scores. According to the numbers generated, we can feel better.
      But does objectification heal? Does it foster growth and deepen wisdom?
      I came to believe that healing, growth and wisdom arise from relationship, not from outcome-oriented manipulation. I chose to leave behind the theoretically-based worksheets, the carefully constructed protocols. What makes the difference is being present with intention on the wellbeing of the other person. The knowledge and skills brought to the session by the psychologist are a part of that being present, as is the care to act respectfully and ethically. However those things are insufficient unless a relationship is fostered to unleash within the client the capacity to heal, to be responsible and do what is needed to address the circumstances of their lives. 
      And now, at this creative time in my life, I discover that music would be just notes and fiction would be just words without the relational presence of the listener and reader. Thanks for reading!

As a new song develops during my practice sessions, working the riffs feels both enticing and frustrating. Musical phrases emerge out of snippets of melody. Eventually a sequence of riffs begins to hang together. As I keep playing with those riffs, harmonic structures add depth and presence. Melody and harmony begin to gel into an arrangement that feels as though everything belongs. I play around with the tempo and rhythm. I try out different voicings for my digital keyboard to find the one that best compliments the harmonized riffs. A stable rendition gradually takes shape with each musical phrase contributing to a common emotional feeling. After a few weeks, it’s a song and ready to take to the coffeeshop.
      But that’s not the end of the song’s development. In subsequent months I find nuances in how those riffs can be played. In doing so, the characteristic feeling comes across more strongly. Listeners at the coffeeshop begin to respond, perhaps suddenly alerting to the music or staring toward the piano in concentration. One listener stated that my songs come across as if they were coming from my heart. Which indeed they do.
      For this blog I want to put a label on that characteristic feeling of a song: it is an emergent property which arises from a complex system of riffs, harmonies, rhythms, variations in timing, and the voicing of the digital keyboard. 
      Different songs have different emergent properties. Some songs feel like being in a French cafe with a roving accordion player. Often coffeeshop patrons say that right away. Other songs feel like being in a piano bar of a classy hotel. And then there are the songs that transport one’s mind to a walk in nature. Each song has its own emergent property arising from its stable structure of musical elements. Some are similar, others break into their own distinct emotional territory.
      Last month I blogged about beauty, how it is more than an attribute or an aptitude but arises from the complex of context, relationship, perceiving and being. Two months ago I blogged about how my songs played the role of friends in helping with my moods and insomnia. Both of those blogs were about emergent properties arising from my music. 
      That label, emergent property, is taken from the theory of complex systems. Complexity Theory provides a different way of thinking about the world around us and our experiences within it, not at all like the way I was trained to think as a psychologist. 
      As a psychologist I was taught to think in terms of entities in categories (e.g. mental health disorders) linear causality (what changes what?) and stages (what is the progression?). This way of thinking forms the foundation for how the professional practice of psychology is regulated. And from what I gather, it continues to be the way the science of psychology is researched and taught. 
      But over my career, I changed. The change arose from being a keen observer and doing my own critical thinking in the therapy room, a great place to observe the human condition. In the safety and privacy of therapy, hypotheses (or perhaps better said, hunches and intuitions) about human subjectivity and behaviour can be developed and then either confirmed or discarded. The ability to be an observer and critical thinker revealed me to be, at my core, a scientist. However, and even more compelling, alongside my scientist-self something else emerged, yet another emergent property of the complex system of which I was a part. The more I dealt with the human condition, the more strongly grew within me the humanistic elements of compassion, empathy, intuition, creativity and respect for individual autonomy. 
      One of the little wisdoms I developed during four decades of being a psychotherapist was “it’s never just one thing”, clearly a nod to complexity theory. 
      If you want to read more about complexity theory, check out my book review of Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise. His book illustrates complex systems in the natural sciences and philosophy.  (https://www.twiltondale.ca/wiltons-reads.html).

But before I go, let’s take another dip into the relationship of complexity theory to my creative process. 
      My novels are the product of years of work. An early draft establishes the storyline with its characters. Then the work begins to construct the complex system to sustain it. I do dozens of rounds of editing, paying attention to how characters think and speak. I lay in contrasts, endeavour to create rhythm to the read. All of that work is to get the many elements of fiction, character and voice and circumstances and happenings, to gel into a stable structure that gives rise to an emergent experience of meaning and feeling for the reader. 
      I’m aiming for a beauty that is different than prettiness. It is the beauty of human nature as it can emerge to be. Healing plays a strong role in my novels as I come to be an author after decades of helping clients heal from mental distress. And, you won’t be surprised that my characters become my friends. I feel their pain, I cry with them and celebrate their breakthroughs: friends, much like my songs in the night.
      I want to share a brief phrase from one of my current novels. The words are simple, ordinary even. But they always bring a tear to my eye and other readers have confessed the same. Here they are in their simplicity: “ … and whispered Merry Christmas in my ear.” 
      The intense emotion these words create in the reader emerges after 150 pages of plot and character development. The stage for them had been set with an evocative description of the music at a Christmas concert in a jazz club. Readers are already well aware of struggles of the speaker and the one spoken to, the perplexities those two characters are facing. Arising from this complex system of character, plot, and setting, profound emotion and meaning are emergent from seven simple words. 
      And with them, a tear runs down your cheek.

Where do you find beauty?
      Perhaps it is in a play-off hockey game, a timely goal scored with finesse. Or perhaps you find it in an oil painting by an artist you have come to love, feeling particularly moved by some aspect of life captured there. Perhaps, in that smile of appreciation from your life partner when you dress up a bit better than everyday to go out for dinner, or when you enjoy a meal that you have cooked together. 
      And while I find beauty in all of the above, especially the last one on the list (and there are many variations on that particular theme), I also find beauty in the turn of a musical phrase in my jazz music or the turn of a literary phrase in my fiction. 
      And yet all that is not quite true. The beauty isn’t actually in the other thing. Let me explain. A fan of cricket might not catch the nuance of the hockey goal, a person who is focused on science and engineering probably doesn’t get the painting, and of course, not everyone is gifted with a fifty year, loving relationship with a life partner. 
      Updating wisdom from the Bard, 19th Century Irish author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford  wrote “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder”. Ergo, the beauty that I see in the hockey goal, that moving painting, my life partner’s smile, the musical and literary phrases of my creativity must be an aptitude within me. If it is, it certainly comes and goes. I don’t always have that capacity for perceiving the beauty in response to such things.  
      I want to propose something very different from beauty being a characteristic of something outside of oneself or an ability within. Beauty exists in the space between things and our subjective experience of them. It arises as out of relationship and context. If you want to read more about this, google Famous violinist busks in the metro.
      Beauty is more than an attribute or an aptitude. It emerges out of the complexity of human life. 
A few weeks ago I played my music in a garden. I was surrounded by lush and well-tended plants, amazingly creative art and well over a hundred visitors eager to celebrate the beauty there. I heard a different beauty from my songs that afternoon: a different context, a different beauty.
      At the coffeeshop I play music where people come for respite from the tasks of their lives. They feel the energy of caffeine and the comfort of the sugar. They come to take a break, enjoy conversation with friends and family, be served by gracious and attentive hosts. When customers find beauty in my music there, it is not just the sounds coming out of my digital piano but also about the context: their mindset in coming in, and the gracious environment.
      But let me share a rather different coffeeshop story. One day sitting at a nearby table a patron was in the midst of talking through a very personal tale of woe. Fortunately, there was also a kind and gracious person at the table to listen and support. But over at the piano I felt the emotional vibe of the complainant’s story. I couldn’t hear the actual content, just the tone and pacing of what was said. As I absorbed it, it felt bitter to me, bitter in a resentful and hopeless sort of way. My playing went off, the beauty went out of my songs, I made errors and retreated to a mechanical effort to stay on track. My aptitude for creating beauty in the songs was no longer realized.
      Same songs, different emotional contexts, entirely different musical (or unmusical) moments.
      You see, it is complicated, eh?

All of this isn’t just cause and effect. It is dynamic. 
      Consider again the music in the coffee shop, this time yet another scenario. A child comes in, has an ice cream treat after doing the shopping with mom. She hears the music and her body remembers movements from dance class. As my rhythm infects her, her smiles and graceful movements infect me. I start to play for her, striving to keep my rhythm steady enough so that her dance moves fit seamlessly. This elevates the discipline of my playing. Trust and relationship build up between that girl and I. Suddenly senior citizen eyes in addition to my own glow with delight in watching the girl dance. The ambiance of the coffeeshop has taken on yet another new vibe.
      Beautiful.
      Ephemeral.
      Memorable.
      Considering beauty as an attribute or an aptitude just doesn’t catch the dynamic essence of what beauty is.

Some of my blog readers are psychologists, as I used to be. They provide that magical and healing endeavour we call psychotherapy, respite for those who are emotionally suffering. As I look back on my decades of doing it, I realize that it taught me about dynamic nature of beauty. Not just in the tears that ran down cheeks, but in the safety and respect created around a suffering person to allow them to work through their distress. 
      And it wasn’t just me as a therapist creating that. Clients came with the expectation that the therapy room could be safe. The safety of therapy comes as a product of traditions and ethics of professional practice that allow emotional intimacy to develop. As a result of that safety, not only were my clients able to deepen and grow more loving but so also was I.
     Psychotherapy, well practiced, enables the presence of grace and wisdom, one human with another human creating a dynamic of beauty and wellness. Both therapist and client become more human as a result. 
      Which is rather like that dancing little girl in the coffeeshop and the warm eyes of the senior citizen looking on. And lucky me, able to be there in the midst.

July - 2024 - Friends www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/07-2024
June - 2024 click-click www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/06-2024
May 2024 - In the zone
April 2024 - How creativity happens ... well, for me anywayclick-click.html
March 2024 - Your bridge to cross
February 2024 - A little Deeper into the human condition
January 2024 - On Darkness
​December 2023 - Note Perfect ... or not!
November 2023 - Just noteswww.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/04-2024
October 2023 - About endings
​September 2023 - Sacred ground
​August 2023 - Are we there yet? 
​July 2023 - How smart is SMART? 
June 2023 - Only half there
May 2023 - Who gets to write the story?
April 2023 - Intersubjectivity. Hunh?
​​March 2023 - A disturbing trend 
February 2023 - About being in the middle
January 2023 - Can we have a little heart here please?
December 2022 - A story about story
November 2022 - Facing One's Fears
October 2022 - Transitional folk
September 2022 - Transitions
​August 2022 —At the other end of life's journey
July 2022—The problem with what emerges.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ... 
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes. 
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus. 
​September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth. ​

You would be forgiven if as you read this blog you think I’m somewhat crazy.
      I want to tell you about some friends of mine -- actually a group of about 30 of them. These friends calm me when I get anxious, lift my mood when I get down. Some are humorous but most are serious in a pensive sort of way. They even massage away the aches and pains from my septuagenarian body. They whisper in my ear when I need to settle into sleep. These friends ground me in the middle of the night when I’m half-awake, my thoughts having gone all kerflooey with persisting dream fragments.
      I am often surprised by new depths of nuance and feelings that emerge in my relationship with these friends. Surprised, and delighted too that they still find new ways of engaging me.
      These friends offer me the gift of presence. They are totally emotional. They don’t speak their circumstances nor their stories. Some of them don’t even have names. They don’t have needs, other than that I spend time with them a couple times a week. Some of them have been loyal friends for about ten years. Some of them I have just met in the last few months. I take these friends out for coffee most Saturday afternoons. Other people in the coffeeshop seem to enjoy their company too. 
      How is that craziness thought doing?
      These friends are my songs. 

And I feel a bit embarrassed about this all, calling my jazz songs friends. They aren’t people, like what friends are supposed to be. And I have those too, cherish them, the people sort of friends. Some of those have been with me for decades, some just the last year or so. 
      I’ve noticed my jazz friends change as our relationship develops, even though they basically play out the same tunes and harmonies. We tend to grow together. Early on they searched for where we could go and what sort of compatibilities we could find. Then they became secure. The longer I play those friends the more nuances in the flow of feeling arise within them. There is a deepening, the finding of grace in their tunes, the security of being together again and seeking out what else we might find new in our relationship. Often they surprise me with just a slight adjustment of rhythm or an alternate harmonic structure that creates the same curiosity and delight as we had when we first met.

I wonder about other artistic mediums. Take, for example, an oil painting on the easel or a sculpture on the studio plinth. As the artist adds brushstrokes or refines the surfaces does that work of art speak back to them about what feels the best? Is there a settling as the artist sees the essence of the piece blossoming into its own unique beauty? Is it a presence -- a changing, emerging presence --— in the studio?
      I can’t imagine what it would be like for a work of art that has inspired the engagement of creation / creativity to leave the studio, going into a gallery or someone else’s home. How empty that easel or corner of the studio must be! How the artist must wonder if in its new home it will inspire the depth of emotional connection that had gone into its creation. I can only imagine the artist feels lonely in its loss.
      I’m glad for my art, those jazz compositions I play each week at the coffeeshop, that they remain with me. Others appreciate them acknowledging their presence, but ultimately they stay as my friends and we get to go home together!

And then, there is that other group of friends: the characters in my novels. I cry with them when they are bereft or overwhelmed. They are all full of words (far too many) and challenging circumstance. Those friends have a different vibe to them as compared with the songs I play at the coffeeshop. I see them, I see what they are seeing. And in their way of seeing, I see me.
      When it comes right down to it, I guess I’m like a kid with a whole host of imaginary friends. Perhaps with a monster or two under the bed, too. 
     
Now this is where all this gets much more difficult.
       Occasionally, while I was practicing as a psychotherapist my clients would voice how they perceived our relationship. They would say that coming to session was like spending time with a really good friend.
      I shuddered (probably not outwardly, but certainly inwardly). 
      I’m sure that what they meant was they felt safe, they felt accepted and valued, that their emotional load was lighter as a result of our time together. Perhaps in the course of their lives it had only been when with good friends that they had felt something similar.
      But about the shudder. 
      As a psychotherapist we are not to be our client’s friend. We are to be a professional. Friendship is about mutuality, each contributing to the wellbeing of the other. The professional relationship is to be totally focused on one person contributing the wellness of the other. The professional is not to meet their own emotional and interpersonal needs through the therapy relationship. 
      The ethics of the profession are clear about this. 
      But as a template for human relationship, friendship existed long before psychotherapy ever did. It is built into us to seek out safe relationships in which we are valued and supported. We fondly name the other in those relationship as our friends.
    
Recently at the coffeeshop I was able to share my new-found friends, the songs I mentioned at the start, with someone from years back whom I had served as a psychologist. That person said he enjoyed them too. And even though I was the musician and he was the listener, there was something mutual in our presence with those songs … together. That was kind of nice. 


    

June - 2024 click-click.html
May 2024 - In the zone
April 2024 - How creativity happens ... well, for me anywayclick-click.html
March 2024 - Your bridge to cross
February 2024 - A little Deeper into the human condition
January 2024 - On Darkness
​December 2023 - Note Perfect ... or not!
November 2023 - Just noteswww.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/04-2024
October 2023 - About endings
​September 2023 - Sacred ground
​August 2023 - Are we there yet? 
​July 2023 - How smart is SMART? 
June 2023 - Only half there
May 2023 - Who gets to write the story?
April 2023 - Intersubjectivity. Hunh?
​​March 2023 - A disturbing trend 
February 2023 - About being in the middle
January 2023 - Can we have a little heart here please?
December 2022 - A story about story
November 2022 - Facing One's Fears
October 2022 - Transitional folk
September 2022 - Transitions
​August 2022 —At the other end of life's journey
July 2022—The problem with what emerges.
June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway?
May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ... 
April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi.
March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone.
February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes. 
January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book.
December 2021 — About time and being human.
November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery
October 2021 — Flow versus focus. 
​September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth. ​

A few months ago my 9 year-old grandson found the buttons on my digital keyboard that unleashed the canned rhythm. Out came the rock beat, complete with drums, bass and rhythm guitar.
      Oh, he also found the volume control too, how it could get really loud.
      Immediately the intrusive beat got the rest of us to pay attention. The smile on my grandson’s face beamed.
      And with it all, I felt betrayed.
      Not by my grandson, no. He was just doing what a normal 9 year-old boy would do, and delighting in doing it. I am glad he felt confident enough to play around with the keyboard in his grandparents’ home. I felt betrayed by my keyboard. All of the reflective jazz, with the thick harmonies and syncopated riffs, were long gone. Out came an unrelenting rhythm as if my living room had become a night club.
      To confess, years ago I played around with those rhythm buttons, never really got the hang of it. The pseudo-music coming from them pulls a person into its beat, doesn’t let go. My melodies stumbled around in there with the canned rhythm, collided with it rather than colluded with the beat.
      My digital piano also has a built-in metronome. Repeatedly over the years I have tried to play to it, eventually giving up in frustration. Perhaps it’s a trauma thing. I used to have to use the swinging pendulum metronome for my practicing of scales and songs when I did my Grade Eight Conservatory exam as a teenager.
      All this gives me cause to reflect on a piano-playing entertainer who provides live music at the coffeeshop where I play on Saturdays. He is really good at using the canned rhythm-maker on his keyboard. Out comes the classic rock songs, with their classic rock beats, while he sings along in a suitably gravelly voice. Folk really like hearing those old songs. He performs really well.
      We all have grown up as listeners to 20th Century music - pop, rock, country - saturated with the invariant beat as audio technology has infused musical performance. Band leaders and orchestra conductors have given way to click tracks (a metallic, metronomic beat that musicians are expected to play to). In popular music, musicians don’t look to a leader or listen to companion musicians to stay together, navigating feeling and meaning within the music. No, they match their playing to a click-click-click-click in their ear.
      But my heart doesn’t beat an unvarying rhythm, neither is my cycle of breath. The natural rhythms of my body rise and fall with my subjective experience of what is going on around me - not click-tracked at all. 

Regular readers of my blog will probably be expecting that other shoe to drop, the one about my years of being a psychologist. Let me start this next part with a story or two.
      I remember hearing of a psychologist who utilized standard treatment protocols for different mental health disorders. If you suffered with anxiety and were on session six with her you would be getting the canned sixth session treatment content. In ten sessions she would be done with you.
      Protocol driven therapies became quite the thing over the course of my career. We all attended workshops to learn the content for each step in sequence of a particular therapy. I once bought a three-inch binder to house the worksheets for one of them. It languished in a bottom drawer of a file cabinet until I finally got rid of it when I retired. During another therapy-protocol weekend training I was shocked to hear the presenter issue a warning: at a particularly critical juncture in the process we were not to stray from her exact wording, reading it from the manual if need be. Yes, we were to take our eyes off our client to insure we were using the innovator’s exact words.
      Prescribed steps in a protocol are the click-track psychotherapy is to follow.
      But I didn’t want my interaction with my clients to be manualized by some distant researcher/innovator who reduced the human condition to symptoms and diagnoses. I didn’t want what I did with my clients to be as if I was acting on objects rather than relating to a person with a unique subjectivity.
      I didn’t want to be guided by the unrelenting beat of goal planning, steps accomplishing, emotion managing, rights asserting, adversity coping and outcome succeeding that our culture prescribes as a root of wellbeing.
      I wanted to find nuance within the life story of my clients, places where my breathing might quicken in anticipation, or my heart slow in gentle reflection. I wanted to see them emerge into a unique version of themselves that would be fulfilling and sustainable. Unpredicted, unpredictable yet apt.
      I wanted it to be human.
      I guess there is an expression for people like me … it goes something like he marches to a different drummer. But that one doesn’t even fit. I just refuse drummers and marching entirely.
​
Oh, it happened again.
      You might remember something I described in last month’s blog, Well, a couple of weeks ago there was yet another little girl at the coffeeshop. She was filled with graceful movement as she listened to my music while eating her ice cream cone. She then was confident enough to come over the piano and plunk away, eventually to dance to the music while I played. I tried to keep my beat as steady as I could. But what was particularly artful was her adapting the practiced moves from dance class to any irregularities that came in my rhythm. She had probably only danced to click-tracked music with its regular beat but she managed to be with me.
      It wasn’t perfect. It was companionable. It was human.

Naturally, I’m curious about it. I know what it is, sort of. And I want it to happen all the time, but don’t know how. When it does happen, it feels like a miracle. That, and like an old friend too.
    Let me explain.
    First of all, before I get to that, I need to tell you about creating jazz music. There’s a technical side to what makes a song jazzy. That special vibe comes from augmenting root chords with major 7ths and 9ths, putting parts of the riff on the off-beat, and resolving dissonance in a particular way. Oh, and there’s the Devil’s Interval. Come up to my keyboard at the coffee shop and have me demonstrate that thing for you (if you dare!). Over the last few years my practice sessions have been exploratory, finding what technical nuance produces what jazzy feeling. Songs emerge, search for their own jazz vibe integrity, get polished up. After a few weeks I’m confident enough with them to share them with the public.
    A coffee shop is a wonderful place to do so. I’m on eye level with my listeners rather than in a pit or on a stage. Being physically close I can sense what folks are tuning into. It’s great when they come up to the piano and talk with me. Recently, an amazingly articulate five year-old in a wonderful purple dress engaged me in a delightful conversation. More about her later.
    But there are some coffee shop disadvantages. Most people relegate my music to the background, choosing to just scroll on their phones or focus on their table conversations. Occasionally, those table conversations get loud. Laughter sometimes breaks out in the middle of a perfectly serene and reflective piece of jazz. And then there’s the noise from the blender shredding up the ice cubes for the smoothies. It kind of shreds the sound space too.  
    Those sort of things can take my mind away, cause me to lose my place in the music. Which is why I have to figure this thing out, this thing I mentioned at the outset of the blog.
    Let me describe it. When it’s there, I become one with the music despite what is going on around me. My gut feels the emotion of the song. The song’s wisdom is whispered yet again in my ear. All vestiges of nervousness disappear along with the fear that I’ll probably just flub things up.
    I am in the zone.
    The amazing thing is that sometimes other people join me there, in that zone, not as musicians but as listeners. I feel them in there with me. So this zone thing is not just in my mind but also a space people can share together.
    Do you remember the little girl wearing the purple dress? That day she came up to talk with me she also joined me in the zone. She danced, first as if she was a solo dancer on stage and then she brought her younger brother to dance with her, ballroom style.
    But the bubble of the zone can burst. And, I’m out of it again, back to just playing riffs, harmonies and off-beat rhythms. I might even loose my place in the song, end up in some musical blind alley, have to go back and orient myself again.
    It’s not at all how I want to be. That is why I need to figure this thing out. So, I have set about noticing everything I can about being in the zone. In doing so, I’ve realized something.
    Let me explain (yet again!).
    My most recent piano lesson was about fifty-five years ago. Back then I was reading music off the page. My teacher taught me to always be reading the music a bar or two ahead, ready for what was coming up next, the immediate next. Doing that, what I was playing at the moment could seamlessly transition into the subsequent musical phrase.
    Now while playing my original jazz compositions it helps to stay in the moment by being mindful that the moment is about what is emerging rather than just what is. It is never about the end of the song, just the immediate next. It is about listening for how this moment evolves, what comes naturally from it.
This is not the first time that I have had experiences in the zone. It happened before when I was working as a psychotherapist.
    Let me give you some background. As therapists we were taught intricate theories about human personality, mental disorders, development across the age span, relationship vulnerabilities, psychological trauma. Then we were taught protocols of interaction with our clients that were scientifically researched to insure they would be helpful. We were schooled extensively in proper ethical behaviour. All this stuff was to be running around in our brains while we talked to our clients so we would do the right thing with them.
    Typically when I was working as a psychologist, if you were to stop me mid-session I could give you a good account of where within all of those teachings I was in working with my client at that moment.    But occasionally, a session would take place when all that other stuff went from my mind. My client and I shared a natural engagement of presence, and wisdom, and compassion, and hope. A profound respect for the personhood of the other had taken over. It would feel enormously deep and infinitely long. While in that engagement, we could allow an immediate next to emerge: a next feeling, a next understanding, a next intention. However after the session when I would come to do my notes, I couldn’t remember the content of what we’d talked about. There was simply the sense that some profound healing had taken place.
    I had been in the zone.
Oh, and by the way. There are Youtube videos on being in the zone. I haven’t watched them.