Uncontain yourself

"Find creativity in every act, and do not sacrifice your need to be creative. Creativity is one of the greatest medicines ever. Exercise it in the way you wash dishes, in the way you walk down the street, in the way you make art. Creativity is essential nourishment. It is not a cute thing to add to your community, nor a luxury, as our government implies. It is the very soul of our sense of self-worth." —Dr. Hunter Patch Adams, Passion and Persistence

"we have to create
it is the only thing louder than destruction
it is the only chance the bars are going to break,
our hands full of color
reaching towards the sky
a brushstroke in the dark
it is not too late
that starry night
is not yet dry"
—Andrea Gibson, Yellowbird

As I was contemplating a blog over the summer I wondered if it would be a waste of time, mine and everyone else's. There is such a plethora, plenitude, proliferation, Pandora's box of content being generated literally every second—

Stop. That is the problem right there. Not the amount of content. That, that indulgence in words for words’ sake when there is stuff that needs to be said. Important stuff. Stuff like Ric O’Barry’s The Cove, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. The fact that $25,000 a minute is being paid as debt to the richest nations of the world by the poorest. (Democracy Now interview on upcoming documentary The End of Poverty.)

If we are to even begin to confront such problems, we cannot stick to our same ways of thinking. Albert Einstein said something to the effect of having to solve a problem on a different level than that on which it was created. We must employ creativity. We must employ creativity not only in tackling issues such as dolphin slaughter in Japan or segregation in South Africa or poverty the world over, but in our everyday lives.

In creating a blog it is essential for me to acknowledge that not only do I not have "the answers to life's persistent questions" (ala Guy Noir), I also desperately need your help and creativity to find them.

Two ingredients are essential for creativity. One is gratitude, whether it is the gratitude for life that drives a salmon to swim hundreds of miles up impossible rapids or the gratitude that slowly seeps into my heart when I can hear the "constructive" in a sharply worded "constructive criticism." The second is curiosity. A genuine curiosity about what could happen differently, when approaching a situation whose outcome I might all-too-hastily write off as unchangeable. This is the sort of curiosity that I think is at the heart of being a good doctor, a good friend, a good partner.

Armed now with gratitude for the opportunity to write this blog and curiosity about what might happen, I am ready to engage you in our first creative challenge. We will skip over trivial tasks such as world peace and environmental sustainability and get straight to the good stuff. Patch Adams speaks about the kind of passion that loves scutwork. If you can’t make scutwork fun, how do ever expect to make the abolition of nuclear weapons fun? I am curious about your creativity in dishwashing.

So uncontain yourself! Go wild with creativity. And wash your dishes at the same time! To the reader who sends in the most interesting picture of something to do with dishwashing, I will send one bar of quality organic fair-trade dark chocolate.

One example of this might be the simple "finished product," i.e. the stack of dishes, and I’ve included some examples of my own. But by no means should you feel limited to this! If you want to wash the dishes wearing a gorilla suit, or in the bathtub, or hang them from a clothesline...endless possibilities.

Simply reply to the blog with your pictures (no more than 5 per entry), or if you run into challenges with that you can email them to me at nedhammar@gmail.com and I will post them for you. If yours is the winning entry, I will contact you for a mailing address and send you a chocolate bar.

Please note that I take no responsibility for any dish disasters that might occur. Have fun!