A day, so the article I read this morning said, to set aside to dream, discover, or invent. But by the time I left my desk and computer for a nap, about two-thirty, I realized I hadn’t been very creative. And that set me to thinking about my daily routine.p
Each morning, with a cup of hot tea at hand, I check my emails. Sometimes that takes quite a while—I have two accounts, one I’ve had for almost forty years (through TCU) and a new one that I try to keep for writing organizations. I belong to two groups that I get daily communications from, both organizational and members’ voices, and both use the relatively new network, io groups. TCU does not like the security certificate that io has and therefore won’t talk to them. I missed a lot of emails before I figured that out, and my son Jamie opened a gmail account for me. I get between ten and twenty emails each morning on each, and some require answers right then, others involve me in reading—including a few political posts.
Maybe my favorite is Wake Up to Politics, which Gabe Fleisher started when he was nine. He’s now a sophomore in D.C., studying I believe at George Mason University. Over the years he has acquired good journalism credentials, so he’s on top of what’s happening, and he presents a fairly balanced view. If your politics tend in the direction of mine, look it up and consider subscribing.
Sometimes emails lead me to articles I’m interested in. This morning it was a longish piece in The New Yorker, cited by Andy Borowitz, about Derrick Bell, whose thinking on racism spawned the critical race theory that is so misunderstood by so many. As a young lawyer Bell was with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He went on to be the first tenured Black law professor at Harvard but eventually left that school, over a matter of principle that involved faculty hiring and people of color, to be a visiting law professor at NYU. The lengthy article traced the development of Bell’s thinking to the point that he decided what most of us saw as advances in demolishing racism really set us back and hardened attitudes. It’s complicated stuff, hard for me with a non-legal mind and education, to understand. But my thought was that if all those idiots who yell about take CRT out of our schools would try to understand what it is, they’d be surprised at how it supports them. The difference, as I see it, being that they don’t want history taught, and he did. But the absurdity of thinking a theory I can’t understand is taught in kindergarten made me giggle and reminded me of the elementary school teacher who said, “If I can get them to read, write, and do basic math, I’m happy.” Who needs CRT is grade school or even high school?
After email, I read the msn news briefs, mostly because they are the ones that flash across my screen. I used to move on to Facebook, but that really is a time killer—the morning had dwindled down to a few minutes by the time I tried to get creative. But even without Facebook, and maybe because of the Derrick Bell article, it was almost noon today before I settled down to my own work.
Often evenings are kind of lazy for me—that’s the time for Facebook and reading whatever is currently on my reading list. Not so tonight, maybe because I had creativity on my mind. But I was almost relieved when our weekly neighborhood happy hour cancelled and the Burtons’ schedule dictated we would not have family dinner. I can stay in my nightshirt and read some more Dorothy Johnson letters.
What about you? Creative today? There are lots of ways to live a creative life, and I probably should branch out to more of them.
