Books, songs, art, recipes, and so media in general are vessels for surprise…that is if you are open to the idea put forth by David Bowie in his interview with Charlie Rose and Julian Schnabel,

“It’s only when you start to move very slightly out of your depth and you feel you’re a little bit lost,  that’s when when you’re going to get something exciting going.”

This is very subtle language. Please note that he says that it is “when you start to move very slightly” out of one’s comfort. You don’t have to become some radical agent of change in order to embrace an idea like ‘surprise’. Bowie even notes how it might feel when you know it is happening–you feel a little bit lost. Not lost in a “Jesus in Gethsemane” sort of way, more like in a “surprised by your grandchild behind the door”  kind of way.  The upshot is that Bowie is showing us how we can go beyond books and media to become vessels of our own surprise.

As I keep saying ad nauseum, we only need observe both in and out of ourselves and then sing.  I think what Bowie is saying here is just another translation of that:  invoke and observe the surprise in your own life wherever it arises–in books, vids, songs, performances, art, et al–and then sing it.

But there is another part to this notion of creative life that arises in the interview.  Schabel quotes William Gaddis from his novel, The Recognitions.

Bill Gattis wrote that most paintings the instant you see them become familiar and then it’s too late. So people want to be comfortable. They get nervous when they’re uncomfortable.

What Schnabel is pointing out is that we can lose almost instantly what I am calling “rewilding” and what the Zen tradition calls “beginner’s mind”.  The author of the blog post where I discovered this interview, Harriet Kindleysides, thinks out loud about how we can forestall this loss of surprise with a few steps:

First, “push beyond first thoughts and assumptions”, embrace the suck. Even if (perhaps especially if) the instant of surprise is uncomfortable, push into it, dwell with it a bit longer than you might or as Bowie argues, get a little lost and out of your depth. Mostly, pay attention to this feeling.

Second, take a different stance, absorb from a different angle or as Emily Dickinson noted, view all the truth but view it slant.  Kindlesides suggests that we might start by reading things we don’t normally read, go to places we don’t normally go to, put ourselves in the shoes of people we don’t normally empathize with.

Third, we need to get out of our own way by starting every project with “an ambition to surprise yourself” not an “ambition to prove what you know”.

It bears repeating, we are vessels of surprise inspiring surprise in others and in ourselves. If we work at being open to the discomfort of being surprised and of having our imaginations be “rewilded”, then a creative universe opens to us all.