Like many people, I ended up homeschooling during the COVID pandemic. In cramming on how to be the best teacher possible to my kids (Oh god please don’t ask me for help with quadratic equations! How did I end up with two math genius kids? They certainly didn’t get it from me!!), I picked up Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating, Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitchel Resnick. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I am enjoying it. Then I hit this passage, and it stopped me in my tracks:
Developing Your Thinking
In the process of writing, you learn to organize, refine, and reflect on your ideas. As you become a better writer, you become a better thinker.
What a brilliant way to phrase it! Resnik takes this a step further and talks about how it applies to coding, but my brain went in a different direction. I would say that this is true of all arts where you try to convey an idea to your audience. Being creative forces you to think through WHY you feel the way you do, to question where those feelings lead. What’s the evolution of that idea? You have to power through your amorphous feelings to something more concrete, something distilled – and in today’s world we don’t always take the time to do that. Art forces us to reflect and refine our mental selves. To be clearer in not only our thinking, but also our feelings – our goals and our desires. It’s a workout for the psyche. Art is an important form of self care. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but: please, please make time and space for art in your life. Don’t even think about feeling guilty about it! We need art just as much as we need to move our bodies and feed our bellies.