Hi, Friends!
If your hand is cramping from non-stop coloring this week, please save the remaining posts for later, take yourself on an Artist’s Date and chill. Life, including social life, can come to feel like we’re pushing boulders up hills only to have them roll back down on us. Have you heard of the artist, Tehching Hesih, who, in the 1980s turned the Sisyphus myth into a conceptual art experiment by recording himself punching a time clock each hour for 365 days? If anything—including creative experimentation with connecting—comes to feel deadening, it’s time to pause for a bit until we have some fresh mojo.
But if you’re energized to throw more color into the mix today, hurray! At this point, does your social canvas feel like any of these below? We’ve been layering in white (solitude), black (struggling doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you), green (we belong to nature) and orange (power to establish dynamics of care.)
And now I present the imaginative purple crayon that creates unlikely friendships.
Did you grow up with Harold and the Purple Crayon, the 1955 kids book by Crockett Johnson? In the story the little boy goes around the city at night using his purple crayon to draw-to-life whatever his imagination conjures: a moon, a boat and his own bedroom window. But what if this book isn’t entirely fiction?
What if our imagination isn’t just the capacity to fantasize, but is also the instrument by which we pierce the veil between what is and what wants to burst into being? Through our imagination, we can develop an almost magical ability to see beyond what is visible to what is latent and capable of becoming real if we help it along. This has been the role of artists and seers forever, but we are in a new, liquified social landscape that requires everyone to develop the imaginative capacities that can make social wastelands into homelands.
When it comes to imagination in connecting, it is important to start with the idea that our context is not absent of connection until we forge it, but rather that we live and move and have our being in an infinite field of existing connection. Or we would be dead. So the disjoint is in our perception of and experience of that connection. The electricity is available, we just aren’t plugged into the outlets. The good news is: so much is possible! Not just in connecting with what is obvious, but in connecting with what and who seems unlikely. We don’t have to grind this out, we can play and paint our way forward.
How about three examples?
ONE: At a recent national conference for leaders in higher ed, we taped Blow-pops and Tootsie-pops under 200+ people’s chairs. Why? Well, why not? But also, I was hoping for two magical things to happen: one, that people would be delighted by the surprise factor, awakening them to a sense of possibility in the midst of a heavily-programmed experience. And two, when I gave them the instruction to find someone 3 tables away and find out if they are a blow-pop or tootsie-pop person, that I would spark some “unlikely friendships” across a fun aspect of their identity. The room erupted in joy, and multiple connections were playfully formed that may not have otherwise if just reading each other’s name tags and titles.
TWO: Cross-class Friendships: Unlikely friendships are only “unlikely” within a prevailing social story that similarities are what breed connection. Similarities can do that, sure, but they’re not the only thing that can. Differences can, and often should, breed connection, too. Take Raj Chetty’s recent scholarship. Chetty’s research found that cross-class friendships boosted social mobility more than any other factor. At USC, a notoriously wealthy private school, students with low social-economic status experience the lowest sense of belonging across all identity markers. It’s one of the least talked about parts of social experience. I tried to get an even going with the credit union to talk about how our financial contexts shape our socializing, but weirdly no one called me back.:) But think about the huge opportunity at college, for example, to facilitate meaningful and life-changing connections across this and so many other facets of who we are.
THREE: Cross-class Friendships (part 2)!
Students often do want to meet “unlikely friends,” but there aren’t social structures or facilitation to help them draw the purple lines. My incredible colleague, Dr. Robin Mitchell-Stroud, co-hosted Creative Salons at USC as part of a grant from Columbia’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute. These were open-ended creative spaces for students across grade levels and majors to decompress through DIY art projects and meet peers from across the university in a low-key environment. So many purple lines came out of this. Let me know if you want to host Creative Salons on campus or at your org.
There are SO MANY ways to connect with people. SO MANY things to connect around. I want us to blow the top off of our tophat to let our imaginations run wild. We have untold connections to every single person on earth—past, present, and future. Until we restore the magic to discovering those connections, our “task” will, at best, be drudgery.
Public place graffiti: the next time you’re sitting in public, draw some invisible purple graffiti lines between you and every person around you. Even if you can’t figure out what the nature of the connection is between you beyond both needing air and water, just draw it there. You can draw it between other people, too. Maybe those two ladies on opposite sides of the park are both in the CIA. Both hate country music. Or both want the price of produce to chill the hell out.
Campus contact bingo: As you are filling your social dance card, make sure to leave space for an unlikely friend. Maybe it’s someone on staff. Maybe someone from the neighborhood surrounding campus who goes to the same taco truck as you. Maybe it’s a pole-vaulting upperclassmen. Be open. Leave space.
Media subversion: Ok, tis the season for media and political parties to be highlighting differences as if they own stock in highlighters. Let’s also take a sec to challenge ourselves to draw purple lines between “opponents.” Imagine that instead of an upcoming debate, we had an upcoming collaborative presidential puzzle-building session hosted by, I don’t know, the local Montessori school. What three hidden bonds might exist between Harris and Trump?
Take Care + See you tomorrow,
Cat
P.S.—Have you seen IF starring Ryan Reynolds? It’s a sweet family film that explores the transforming power of imaginary friends.
Unlikely Friendships in the animal kingdom is one of the most moving books out there. But why read a book when you can begin your unlikely friendship today with your new pen pal?!
