About that time I built a city

And how it didn’t bring what I’d hoped.

Be careful what you plan for

It was the end of September, the year 2011. Our art supply store needed a good buzzfeed for the end of year. You know, create a December hump in turnover. A pre-Christmas influx to boost the sales.

We had a two floor paradise for creatives. After ten years of good growth we moved to the other side of the street to a building four times the size. Pioneering into online sales. Offering a huge range of brands. We shifted from just the two us to a ten person business. Sailing seemed smooth. Let’s do something special, something unusual and surprisingly fun and free. Something that shows creativity is present even in a dull cardboard box.

We did have a mountain of those. All the incoming goods came with their own size packaging and we kept all for shipping out the webshop orders.

A mountain of good raw material. Pure sin to let the paper recycler get rich for free. We would show the world (or at least the passers by) we knew about making stuff from nothing.

The best places are not centrally planned….a heap of conflicting interests, dead end streets and broken rules…

Creamed-coffee-coloured-corrugated-cardboard

I tinkered a landscape of pallet-hills and scrap-wood-valleys on a good hundred square meters and started building my first tiny house. Simple rules. Creamed coffee coloured corrugated cardboard and matching gummed paper tape. A glue gun was allowed as long as it wasn’t visible. The monochrome colour range would tie it all together as one organically grown Italian dream town. Anything was good. A church, a cottage, a railroad station. I made examples, printed lists of idea invoking prompts, send out an enthusiastic mail and some lyrical writings to the regional press. I Invited everyone I knew to come help and realise our end of year creative spectacle. We would build a utopian urban dream that was going to win best shop window display of the decade. I could see it in my mind’s eye and spent every spare minute on upping my skills with surgical blades to cut out a thousand windows, to shape rooftops, to construct geodesic domes and dead end alleyways. I motivated reluctant employees to do their part of the ‘homework’. Hauled in befriended parents from the primary school for an afternoon of family fun. Things started taking shape. I was hyped.

Customers found it weird. A bit much. They were indifferent, or even complaining about the messy chaos of cardboard spills in their oil-paint isle. No volunteering enthusiasts showed up. Sales didn’t peak at all. No noticeable change compared to last year. I explained that by telling myself it wasn’t finished yet. Still a month to Christmas and then people would start to see the magic and be enlightened about where to spend their money.

With lots of extra hours and our home sliding into cardboard building production studio chaos, we managed to finish the paper town. I hired special theatric lighting, a smoke machine, a beamer projecting falling snow, I compiled a playlist of enchanting tunes and sent out almost five thousand invitations for the grand opening on Saturday the 21st of December.

We had free coffee, hot chocolate and homebaked goodies. We dressed extra nice. And waited all morning on a very desolate shop floor. We had three paying customers. Nobody came for the city we had built. Somehow I had made a huge mistake, ruined the best Saturday of the year.

Was it too far out? This was twelve years ago, Pinterest was still new and exiting and cardboard building largely unheard of. I don’t know. Was it a total downer? I sure wasn’t too happy and it did definitely not bring in money or fame for our store that end of year.

But wait the story isn’t done yet. After three months of wading up to our ears in cardboard crap, enduring paper-cuts in our armpits and feverish corrugated nights, we were done with the magic kingdom. Third week of January it would be dismantled.

Two days before the shredder date the phone rang. A journalist wanting to do an article and a photoshoot. Well okay, that couldn’t hurt. That same afternoon another caller. National television. If I would be willing to appear in a morning show and talk about my wonderful project? Travel expenses covered.

I brought a few buildings, got powdered and grimed, did the interview with a stiff smile and announced a giveaway. Anyone with a good plan could have my city.

Now there were responses. Now customers at the register told us how amazing the project was. Assholes, I thought. I was utterly annoyed.

A lovely school won the prize and we rented a truck and brought them lucky bastards all the wrought towers, bridges, the zeppelin, the train, the castle and the cathedral. A camera crew followed us and filmed the transfer. Two six year olds carrying a theater. Classrooms invaded by high rise offices dwarfed by wide eyed children. The kids would paint the town as a school project. I think they had fun with it.

Three weeks later the tv-show called again to summon me for the inauguration. I stood them up. Had spent enough money and time and friendliness on this one.

Was it a failure? Yes, the plan did not work. It did the opposite of what I had intended. Or so I thought at first. I did have lots of fun building the damn thing. But it made me aware of an underlying problem. Of a huge misalignment lingering in me. One that was about to get more obvious in the years after. It had always been there unconsciously now it started to make itself known.

I sold creative materials, I taught creative workshops, I did lots of things considered creative but I did not understand creativity.

Most people do not really understand. Me saying that might annoy you. I only wish to share that I still struggle with the mystical force.

People, us humans, pretend they like new things. What they mean by that is stuff and experiences that are known but new to them. We want what others have, what is over there. Not the unknown. The unknown new is scary. Not exciting scary, but frightening in the true sense. It is placing your foot in utter darkness. Anything could be there. Reach out and touch? I don’t think so. And no matter how much energy we put in, to imagine our next move, the next encounter, nothing helps. So we choose what we know. Each and every time we get to choose we pick what we have seen before, the familiar, the relative. Not the wild card. Not the strange unknown new.

In my small example, customers couldn’t see what I tried to make before it was made. They simply ignored it until it was. And then people kept asking if we would do it again next Christmas.

Hell no, was my inner response. Don’t ask me to repeat a painting. I did have this urge all my life. Longing to see what lies ahead. What is in there. What lies behind the horizon. What else can be done. I don’t much care for playing the same song again and again. To have sharply defined goals.

A dangerous longing when acted upon. Pretty soon you are on your own in trying. If you aim for nothing you will harvest nothing. One companion after the other stays behind. Finds an excuse to turn around and go back.

See, we’ve landed in the scary bit of the movie. Things go quiet and dark and lonely. And nothingness can take on any shape. And you know what that means if your imagination is alive and kicking. Creativity is a brutal force. Raw and savage. It induces fear. The cardboard city thing made me think differently about the cosy face we glue on this wild entity. The nice and easy label we stick on the primal force of renewal. How the line between the known and the unknown is present in all that we do. Right in front of us. And how we avoid that reality by filling our lives with sameness. How we turn our backs to the living reality. How we are getting stuck deeper and deeper into doing the same things over and over again, trying to get different results from basically the same actions. And how change comes anyway.

And change sure had come knocking. It had started to draw my attention with lots of little warning signs. The force asked, so, you really want a new city? I raised my hand in curiosity and the great teacher turned its attention to my blind stumbling. You wish to learn huh, they seemed to say. Are you sure?

I don’t think I ever wanted to be a shop owner. Even now the idea of buying things, and selling them for twice the price sounds alien and empty to me. The city project showed me how misaligned I was. I couldn’t get what I wanted and I got what I didn’t care for.

We do not recognise the new.

Still, I chose to keep going. To see what else was possible. I learned a thing or two about the creative force and they were not easy lessons. You can either learn them on a voluntary basis in a relatively safe setting or you can procrastinate and let change crush you when the known tower blocks of your stacked assumptions come crashing down. Because the unknown comes at you like a city bus if you do not care to look that way.

I have been ‘teaching’ creative stuff for a good fifteen years and kept experimenting with ways to deal with the core of it. I did find some amazing ways and I will try to share the surprising outcomes. I am still learning. Always a beginner. A seven year old before that moment of discouragement happens. Before we are warned off and never again seem able to really go there, to visit the enchanted woods. It can no longer be avoided. The woods are here. We are in, despite all the efforts to not go there.

I sometimes think misunderstanding the creative nature of this place is the main cause of our troubles….

We did dragons the year after. Paper clay monsters. Yes, let’s talk about creating monsters some day soon.....

The above is the follow up post in this series.