Jailbroken

Stick me into a mandatory meeting…
Where I’m swallowed up in a sea of chairs…
And shove a bland 8×11 meeting agenda into my hands…
And you have just created the perfect conditions to awaken my Inner Doodler.

Within fifteen minutes, every centimeter of white space not consumed by a bullet point is tatted up with mindmaps and brainstorming bubbles, tiny graphic flowers and patterned shapes. Sometimes I just flip it and ideate via drawing (as evidenced by the doodle above from last Friday’s staff meeting).

As I get lost in my masterpiece, whatever poor tortured soul is trying to dutifully take notes next to me often whispers, “I didn’t know you could draw.”

(Could is a vague term of course.)

(Meaning, a lot of people “can” draw compared to a seven year old…or compared to a pet cat. But if you put a professional illustrator in the room, they “could” be smirking their lips off at my scribbling.)

Then comes the why it never occurred to my meeting-buddy that I might draw…

“You just seem like…a thinker.” This is followed by their observations of how my mind works. You’re a teacher, you present information, you write trade books, you organize events …

What they mean, of course, is that I’m supposed to be “right brained”.

And right brained people don’t draw.

But I don’t buy that. Instead of retreating back into half our brains, I think we all need to be jailbroken.

I believe the right-brained organizers of the world would be stronger thinkers if they chose to immerse themselves in more left-brained artistic endeavors from time to time.

I find that the principles that guide art–what makes things aesthetically pleasing, for example–have carry over value into a lot of other fields. Learning the processes that go into a good painting or photo provide me entire new streams of ideas that I never would’ve been able to bring to the table before.

AND I find that slowing down and gliding paint across a canvas, working and re-working an idea visually, is good for my to-do-list-checking soul. It eases me into a little more balance.

It’s one of the only tasks I do where I don’t multi-task.

And sometimes, as I create, challenges I’ve been over-working in my brain seem to subconciously solve themselves. Peace arrives.

In case you’re wondering, it also works the other way around. People who strike the world as “left-brained” can also seek to learn skills that may not come naturally to them too. They can go to workshops or read books or watch videos that help them sharpen their planning skills, that help them systemically think beyond their emotions or their devotion to the project at hand.

My friend Jimmy is so well known as a guitarist that artist is one of the first words friends would use to describe him. He is the kind of talent people grow up wanting to be and the type that even untrained listeners can pick up as lightyears above the norm. He got that way by losing himself in music for decades.

But through reading and practice, Jimmy figured out how to organize and market his performance skills so that he could book regular gigs. And he also developed a really comprehensive portfolio of lessons that allowed him to recruit a full roster of students.

As you think through what I’m saying here, be warned: Jailbreaking yourself will not be immediately satisfying.

I gravitated toward right-brained undertakings for much of my childhood. So at first–when I enrolled in my first watercolor class, for example–I felt awkward, like a fish trying to rock-climb. And, to be honest, I sorta sucked.

After the first night of class, my water colors were like kindergarten pics, with heavy stains and drip marks, that even a mom wouldn’t post to a fridge. I was tempted to bail, to throw up my hands and say, This is why I should stick to the right-brained world.

But I didn’t. And you know what? After ten years of absorbing myself in these kinds of endeavors, I have occasionally found myself in the opposite scenario than I described at the beginning of this post. Sometimes people see me doing something like handwriting pages and pages in notebooks, or they see me cross-legged and painting in the park, or they see me doodling pages of mindmaps and pictograms into my journal…and they are surprised to find out that I’m a speaker and/an organizer.

I’m convinced, from my own experiences, that those of us who consider ourselves to be wholly “right-brained” or “left-brained” need to be jailbroken.

Shed the coding that limits you from doing all that you can do.

If God wanted us to be half-brained people, he would’ve just given each of us one half a brain.