These are musings that are picking on the trails of yesterday’s conversation.

The weather is typical Boston at this time of the year. It has been raining and overcast all day and it is starting to get colder. Perhaps it is Ida from Louisiana. (She was bad – memories of Katrina, when I was in Houston and had to deal with fallen Oaks in the yard).
Anyway, Charles wanted to leave so we rose up from our chairs and started inching out – so typical of the unwillingness to let go of an interesting conversation.

Sometime towards the end of our chat, Charles brought up Ornette Coleman again. It was about our thread regarding teaching creativity and whether it was at all possible to learn, or whether it was a gift. He felt he himself had inherited a gift – being that the piano was in the family and his grandfather played.

Coleman was disappointed that he could not express all that he felt. It was framed as if that was a failure. I thought that discontentment was the gift that every creative person experiences. That vastness of spaces creative people dwell in, and the inability to reify or manifest it all.

I brought up the notion of practice, and its essentially discontinuous nature, of hitting roadblocks and then making discontinuous jumps. We had to trust that every person had some creativity in them, and it was a matter of persistence and practice.

Anyway, I must try to remember what we talked about, but my thought this morning had to do with discontentment.
I was walking one morning with a colleague from RISD to the Studio. Along the way we both were doing what we normally do, stopping to look at things, taking pictures and so on. Something about the way the road stripes were painted got us into a discussion, that led us to the notion of discontentment.

I felt that this sense of discontentment was so intrinsic to who I was as a designer, and he said that was how he felt too. I asked him how his partner dealt with it, because one of my exes thought poorly of me because of my perpetual discontentment. Perhaps one is confused by some Buddhist notion of living in acceptance and contentment – well Buddha was no designer.

Anyway – that is my point. Discontentment is a gift. It is not a wound ( Gillian Reingold), or maybe it is – a wound on the world. Noticing how something could be different, or better. It is the opposite of acceptance and inaction.

Being a designer/practitioner is not something you do when you step into a studio or an assignment. It is not then alone that you think of making a better world. It is who you are, it is about a state of being.

And this discontentment is deeply satisfying – a source of happiness, for it is the ultimate source of being alive and creative.