Photo: my own.
Last year, a girlfriend and I started taking Japanese brush painting lessons together. Sumi-e is an ancient style of painting in which artists use different kinds of brush strokes to apply black ink on paper or silk. Each stroke imparts its own particular shape and energy: taken together, they render the expression of flowers and branches, trees and mountains, insects and animals.
It wasn’t until I felt the weight of the brush, the saturation of bristles, and the glide of brush and ink over paper that I realized how much I missed the process of creating something with my hands.
After a few lessons, I began to notice other minor acts of hands-on creation in which I regularly participated: making dinner, planting flowerpots, decorating for the holidays, writing an overdue thank-you card. Unlike painting, I tended to approach these things with low-grade irritation—like hearing a housefly buzz in the background that you can’t locate. It was the quality of my attention, I realized, that differed: I wasn’t working with the lens of a creator, but as an administrator looking to complete the task and move on to the next thing.
Which got me thinking: What if I brought a hands-on, creator-mindset to even the smallest effort? What if I expanded the concept of ‘hands-on’ creativity to include human connection beyond (not in place of) the internet?
These are difficult, disconcerting times. Political, social, and financial volatility is coursing through our phones, laptops, and TVs like level 5 wild rapids. Reasonable people may argue about what the Algorithm wants for us (and what it’s doing to us), but I’m pretty sure it’s not to paint a bamboo leaf, bake a berry crumble, or gather with friends and colleagues in-person for conversation and community.
In the disembodied world of clicks, swipes, VR and AI, it can feel like an act of rebellion to create, converse, move, think, even dream offline—the practice of iconoclasts and grumpy contrarians.
This shouldn’t be. We are born embodied animals designed for motion, save death, sleep, and cases of extreme disability. There is great satisfaction in the physicality of hands-on, tactile creativity. There is also power.
The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, observed that power emerges—not just from whenever, but wherever people act together—and that true power does not reside in any one person or thing, but in the combination of many powers.
An émigré from war-torn Europe, Arendt believed the United States’ unique dispersion of powers comprised a “constitution of freedom” unlike that of any other country. She wasn’t just talking about the different branches of government, but (I believe) the creative power that arises when civic, professional, community, and faith organizations gather together—most naturally in-person, in accordance with the times during which she wrote.
I would add that because the large is a reflection of the small, we ought not to discount the infectious creative energy of small, in-person gatherings of friends and colleagues. Some of my best ideas for writing and storytelling have occurred over coffee or lunch with one or two people.
Of course the Internet is a powerful tool for creativity. I couldn’t possibly recount all the ways new platforms and technologies have changed, are changing the ways we communicate and share, work and organize.
But when we engage the world without the veneer of technology, things take on a different feeling: posture and movement aid perspective; technique and skill turn into persuasion; practice translates into making mistakes, throwing stuff out, and trying again; and success arrives on the wings of repetition … and patience.
Look, I’m not suggesting we paint pictures and bake berry crumbles in lieu of trying to address serious, urgent problems: I’m saying there are valuable lessons and wisdom to be found in hands-on, tactile creativity, in our brushes and bakepans, gardens and gatherings.
It’s not possible to approach every act of creative expression with the devotion of artists and angels. But making room to paint, draw, sing, build, cultivate, nurture, and invent through our imperfect, embodied selves doesn’t just separate us from the machine, it keep us from becoming it.
The titans of technology are trying their best to compel us toward singularity—a time when technology and human beings merge into one (previously the stuff of sci-fi and dystopian fantasy). Indeed, the singularity sign-up sheet is being passed around with great gusto, and the list of registrants is long, loud, and excitable.
Though it may feel otherwise, we’ve not lost our capability, moreover our duty to apply a critical, humanistic lens to the titans’ super powers and their super promises. This doesn’t mean disengaging from some of the greatest innovations of our time, but remembering to re-engage with our own, embodied creativity.
Hands-on: an old idea, hardly rebellious. It barely brushes against radical. It is, quite simply, not what the Algorithm wants for us. And so what?