Interesting

My school is teaching me - or at least reminding me - about how important it is to notice my interests, note them, and follow them. To observe how interests change, how they lead me to discoveries in big/little projects, or to new projects, or to new appreciation of this moment.

​Last August at SITI Company's 2015 Boise Workshop Intensive in Viewpoints and Suzuki (two actor training practices I'm mad about, that teach me how to be human as well as how to be an artist), facilitators G.M. Gianino and Leon Ingulsrud stressed the importance of performers finding interest in what's happening around them, rather than trying to be interesting. 

And last fall, Elizabeth Gilbert forsook her usual urging for people to find their passions, replacing that with a call for us to follow our interests like hummingbirds.

I realize these are all simple, even obvious teachings. The obvious lessons are the ones that knock me over the most. I always need more simplicity in my life.

​Here are some things I noted interest in yesterday morning:

• How we think (we being humans, animals, others)
• Stillness
• Taking walks, and how I see and think differently when creatively wandering 
• Finding my breath
• Finding out what slow art means
• What it means to listen
• How it feels to make eye contact
• How my body moves through space
• How to write with the sensibilities of the performer in mind - the actor/singer/dancer
• How to write with the designer in mind, or the composer, or...
• How children think
• How animals move
• The way we keep certain things. Some people keep a lot of shoes.
• Some people recycle glass. Some people recycle nothing. Some people compost.
• What people's gestures say about them in that moment
• How an artist's life has a different clock
• The gender and race gap in theater and film (and everything)
• The Syrian atrocities, the refugee crisis 
• How people-treating-people-as-not-people is an epidemic
• How my own fear habits keep me from writing or posting views on the perverse inhumanity of people in power, the Donald Trumps of the world
• How I situate myself as an outside observer despite my strong political viewpoints
• How I'm discovering that the Enneagram is a thing I need to read more about
• My friends' superpowers
• And how you'll be spending this year​

A few of us following our interests at SITI Boise 2015, including me and my dear friend Sarah Gardner. Photo Andy Lawless.

​Interests are dots to connect. Bright windows to new universes. They're little creative maps, living map lines that change fluidly, and change me (us?). It amazes me lately, how much it opens me up from my chest, following one interest at a time.

During my first Writers in the Schools residency this year, we spent a whole session focused on what it means to cultivate our interests. It wasn't a waste of time, not one bit. We could have spent a whole month on this road, or a year. 

What interests you right now? ​