It seems extraordinary that, when training people in creative thinking, I should need to spend such a large amount of time just getting them to listen to themselves.
For it is in our own thoughts and feelings that new thinking, new ideas, are born.
The problem usually stems from our educational pasts. At school it has always been consistently demanded that we pay attention to the teacher. There, “concentrating” means listening to him or her, not to oneself.
Yet so often what happens is that the teacher has said something interesting that stimulates us to go off on a fascinating internal journey, exploring the implications of what has been said. Yet, to the teacher, this can so easily be interpreted and censured as just not paying attention, “daydreaming”.
But how exciting and valuable daydreaming can be.
As the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, put it (in a famous letter to Paul Demeny in 1871): “I witness the flowering of my thought: I gaze at it, I listen to it: I set my bow moving: the symphony stirs into life in the depths, or comes leaping on to the stage.”
[J'assiste à l'éclosion de ma pensée : je la regarde, je l'écoute : je lance un coup d'archet : la symphonie fait son remuement dans les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scène.]
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