Half life

I live a double life. Half of me is resident crumb-sweeper and bedtime storyteller of our family of four, while the other half is mentally miles away dreaming up projects, threading the needle of a story, and compulsively suggesting to Amazon that Penguin make The Poisoner's Handbook available on the Kindle until it is. I'm a junk food addict who has convinced herself to eat healthily. I'm a recovering over-achiever who can be extremely lazy. I'm what Figen Çakır calls people like us, a 'double agent': half of the time defending Turkey when I'm in the US, half the time longing for all things Americana when I'm here.

My last post is about being a hybrid of two-or-more things.  I wonder while burning sage to clear out negative energy in my house if I've left some parts of my life deliberately hidden to savor and protect them. Kept the dualities and unlikely opposites tucked away. Can all this business about duality and different aspects of one self start to be a drain on the senses? Enter the half-life. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a half-life is the time taken for the radioactivity of a specific isotope to fall to half its original value. I'm interested in how science, creativity, and domesticity intersect in this respect. If I were to equate it to being a work-at-home mom while living abroad, have I been quietly urging myself along to be half-living in several realms at the same time?

Yanking myself from one realm to the other has become second nature, but I'm starting to slow down, to make the transitions smoother. My daughter is nearly two, and she has taken reign over my computer, navigating keys effortlessly to fast-forward through two hours of Sesame Street in four minutes. While she pages away, I work on a cross-stitch of frolicking bunnies. Some days this all seems more surreal than is healthy. She now eats at the counter with me, scooping up cream cheese with crackers from the tub while I think 'this is not a good long-term habit' and munch along with her. This simple act of eating makes me think of my mother. She supposedly liked bread with butter and cream cheese, and lately I've sorely been wishing I knew more about her than that and she read Ingrid Bergman: My Story and canned all sorts of fruits and vegetables. But invention and imagination are wonderful devices in filling in the gaps, and creating a legacy of eating crackers and cream cheese with my daughter at the counter might be one microscopic way to stay present in all these contrasting realms.

The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life

20 women sit around long tables pushed together in a corner of a café in Istanbul on a Saturday morning. The clink of coffee cups, the murmur of orders being placed. I pace around a little bit, preparing myself physically and mentally to talk about creativity to this group of professional women that I have been a part of since 2007.

The painter Robert Motherwell reportedly always started his day with figure drawing, though in his finished work, literal figures are scarce. He did it because it got him up and moving, pushing kinetic energy around until the good stuff could come out. He knew the power of drawing.

I have planned a drawing exercise for this reason, and I move around the room, saying hello to all the women who have come: a mother with her 6 month old baby and her 4-year old daughter, a salon owner, lawyers, entrepreneurs, writers, bakers and teachers.

The title of my talk is The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life. I hand out sheets of paper and pencils, and we do one of Betty Edward’s exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I do this to dispel the “I can’t draw” so “I’m not creative” myth. I also choose this exercise because it relates to perception. How we think we see a chair, a hand, a house, but what we really see is a symbol. By slowing down our brains, we trick it into overriding its impulse to see the symbol of a hand and not its network of lines, hangnails, smooth nail beds, and curve of the thumb. Some women grasp a shift in their awareness immediately, others later as I talk about the application of a seemingly simple exercise to the borderlands of work and home, to professionalism, to adapting to life as an expat in Turkey.

I talk about navigating new territory abroad. About being faced with making decisions in the gray areas of bi-cultural life. I talk about reinvention. The spark. Creativity as a way of being and not just the action of sitting down to make something or write something. I talk about the magic of dialogue, concluding by putting out the extraordinarily uncomplicated idea that all moments in life are art. And then I pose this question:

Can you identify where you feel moments of spark in your own life?

Now, where are yours?