COFFEE CREATIVITY

FROM WHERE I SIT  COFFEE CREATIVITY  March 25, 2014 Pat DeKok Spilseth

As Dr. Seuss wrote in his book that I used to read to my children,

 “How did it get so late so soon? 

It’s night before it’s afternoon.  

December is here before it’s June.  

My goodness how the time has flown.  

How did it get so late so soon?”  

Where did the time go?  Some days I feel that I’m mindlessly drifting on an endless treadmill, going nowhere.  I find myself shuffling worn cards, playing solitare to pass the time.  Though the sun is shining today, I have little energy to try something new or tackle a task that needs to be done.  My energy seems to be dissipating with each new year, especially during the winter months when the sun doesn’t shine so brightly.   Darkened hours take over my days, sending me to bed with a good book in the early evening.

It’s winter.  That’s the problem.  I’ve got to shake myself out of this lethargy.  Maybe another cup of strong, black coffee will help.   Coffee helps energize me, but I often wonder how could a cup of tasty coffee be good for me?  Doctors are now saying that dark chocolate and red wine are good for our health.  Who knows what they’ll discover about coffee!   I just read an article by Sanjiv Chopra, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who wrote that ”Coffee is truly a lifesaving miracle drug.”

According to Dr. Chopra, it’s still a scientific mystery how a simple cup of  coffee works wonders in the body.  In The Readers’ Digest, epidemiological studies repeatedly verify coffee’s astonishing benefits: 

*More than three cups a day lowers women’s risk of developing the most common skin cancer by 20%.

*More than six cups a day cuts men’s risk of dying from prostate cancer by 60 percent.

*Drinking at least one cup of coffee a day lowers women’s risk of stroke by up to 25%.

*Consuming at least two cups daily reduces women’s chances of becoming depressed by up to 20%.

I feel new energy from a strong cup of java!   Coffee recharges my energy and creativity: I’m back writing columns at the computer, baking cookies, and I just popped a casserole in the oven.  WOW!   

Read Mark Walton’s Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond.  National Institute on Aging’s director Sunil Iyengar said.   “Enhanced creativity is associated with greater satisfaction,” Though dementia or brain damage can affect creative output, in a healthy brain, decline is not a given.”  

There’s no reason to assume that people lose their energy and stop being creative just because  we get gray hair.  Check out those energetic, aging rockers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 69.  They’re still strutting across stages around the world and draw huge crowds for their concerts.  

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism wrote about her own creativity: “Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever.  Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”

To stay creative and original in later years, we have to be willing to try new things.    Self-help columns tell us to take up a new hobby, learn another language, travel...  Salvador Dali switched from painting in the classical art style he was trained in to surreal painting and sculptured objects.  Remember seeing those crazy clocks of his with sagging faces?  Matisse, my favorite artist, went from painting lovely, serene family and landscape scenes to assembling colorful cutout shapes on paper.  When Norman Mailer lost his teeth and was walking with two canes, he was still writing.   Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was in her seventies, but when she died at 101, she had created 1600 works of art.

Rex Jung, assistant professor  of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, thinks that older people have lots of data  and fewer brakes inhibiting their thoughts. They’re able to put things together in more novel and useful ways.  He said, “When you see an increase in people’s creative undertakings in retirement, it may not be just because they’re retired and have more time on their hands; it may be because the brain organization is different.”  

Age can bring diminished energy, but also there’s a greater urgency to the creative process.   We don’t want to run out of time before completing a project that consumes our interest.  Writer Valerie Trueblood wrote, “...you just see the brevity of life more acutely when you’re older, and I think it makes you work harder and be interested in making something exact and completing it.”

It could be that society’s stereotypes about aging may be the biggest creativity killers.

When we begin to sense the lengthening shadows of age, we need to shake off that midlife shiver and try something new and different.  Give your brain a jolt.  We may be getting gray, but coffee can help spur our brains to keep working.  Have another cup of java.  847 words