Secrets and synchronicities -- Ava Lindberg's blog

Two days ago I was running at the Hudson and on my third cycle going round the dock, saw the Staten Island Ferry slowly making its way up the Hudson.  The location was the 83rd and 84th Piers.   The Staten Island Ferry was going somewhere, but it was out of place.  The seeing of this icon–all gold, worn, with old-fashioned typeface–empty, heading upstream far away from its usual location to and from Staten Island…shocked me.  I stood with my mouth open, my gaze unable to move off the passing ferry.   It continued, very large, slow, and steady, to pass by just as I was running out to the edge of the dock, then I stopped, hung over the railing, and watched it until it was too small to see, as it slowly made its way up river.

I had no digital camera on me during this incident so I post a picture from Wikipedia to show you what it looked like moving up the Hudson.

Had I not gone running at that moment or had I not looked at it clearly–thinking instead that it was a yellow NY Water Taxi–I might have missed the event.

Why was the Staten Island Ferry moving upsteam on the Hudson, empty?  Why was it so far from home?  Perhaps it was going for repairs.  Perhaps it takes a periodic vacation for cleaning or maintenance, which is located up river.  Perhaps it was moving in a new location because this particular Staten Island Ferry was no more.  Perhaps it does this all the time.  But, I run here all the time at this same time of the morning, and have never seen such a strange event on the water.  Once I lived in a penthouse on 94th Street and Riverside and looked from the high floor over the river, but never did I see the Staten Island Ferry on the Hudson during the five years I had this residential perch.

Post script:  Since I originally wrote this post, I found a picture on a July 13, 2008 blog that shows the Staten Island Ferry going upriver on the Hudson.  So, apparently, it happens once in a while even though it seems totally unusual to me, not expecting to see the Staten Island Ferry outside of lower Manhattan.

Whether it’s unusual or not, it is to me.  And, doubly so, because within minutes, another associative “ferry event” occurred.    As I was returning home 10 minutes later, I ran by an old white truck with a clear sign on it, A. Ferry.    I stopped and looked, strangedly moved.  What was A Ferry…what is a ferry?   What is the A?

My name is Ava which starts with A.  Is it a general reference to me as A… the identity of Ferry… or a peculiar connection with my name in symbolic terms relating to ferry?

Perhaps the ferry reference relates to movement, transition, and going somewhere unusual.  Perhaps it is relating to a new project in academia… my interest in taking a doctoral degree in Depth Psychology with emphasis on Jungian and Archetypal Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute.  This pending decision–serious, not yet made, but in the planning stages–feels like a deeply exciting transition into a new but surprisingly familiar area in my life….the chance to continue full-time qualitative research that already has significant usage of deep projective methodologies like archetypes with a full-time doctoral program that is now specific to Jungian, archetypal psychology– hybrid, some residence in NYC and some in Santa Barbara….with a good portion online.

So, what is A Ferry?   What is a ferry?   What is the connection and synchronicity between the Staten Island Ferry and the truck with A. Ferry?  I just checked with Wikipedia, and it explains the obvious:  that a ferry is a boat that acts as public transportation moving regularly to take passengers between two locations on a scheduled basis.  It moves from one location to another for people who work or live or need to travel back and forth regularly.  Ferries leave and arrive on time, dependably.    It feels as if the ferry vision indicates that I may soon be taking a ferry between two points of the country, signaled by the quiet-, quick-moving, subtle Hudson vision.

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A small synchronicity I will describe on a spontaneously arising topic that at first seemed arbitrary but now feels relevant and thematic.

Today, I was walking to a meeting in New York City, midtown, in the late afternoon when I passed an ordinary dry cleaners called Cleanatopia.   Not sure why I became aware of this name–Cleanatopia nonetheless started me thinking about the suffix topia and how it implies abundance, heavenly, ideal, or something to do with utopias.

I mused on how a utopia may be defined as an earthly place that seems akin to paradise, is a community founded on certain strong idealistic or humanitarian philosophical principles, involves people of like mind living together in a genial collaborative way in which work is shared and the fruits of labor are enjoyed, with creativity often a part of the leisure experience.  Some of the great utopian communities were created in the 18th and 19th centuries–some were made up of writers, artists, philosophers…and always idealists.  Some lasted a long time (Findhorn in Scotland, I believe is still operating successfully as the famous community of gardeners in which spiritual principles help to grow fantastic vegetables and flowers).  However, most utopias have not.  So, I thought of how utopias are often temporary abodes.  I then reflected on brands with the suffix topia that were popular for a time but then disappear, like the beverage Fruitopia from Coca Cola.

This musing on utopias probably lasted half a minute at most.  Before I forgot about it, I thought to myself, I wonder whatever happened to utopias?  They seem long gone.

I went to a concert, The Golden Key Salon, at Faust Harrison Pianos on 58th Street, where I heard a magnificent series of performances by great musicians to a small audience in a chamber music-type venue–pianist Pavel Gintov, cellist Aron Zelowicz, pianist Vanessa Fadial, violinist Gary Kosloski, singer Elizabeth Munn, and pianist Kathryn Olander were the artists performing Beethoven, Chopin, Faure, and Strauss.   The Salon–in its third year–was founded by pianist-writer-visionary Madeline Bruser as part of her Golden Key Institute–a non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging and educating musicians to perform with ease and communicative power.   I did the original qualitative research on the Institute, whose insights helped to support the idea of the Salon.

At the reception after the Salon, I met a man whose hair was tied up in an attractive pony tail, which I liked.  We talked.  He is a pianist and composer.  He told me that he is moving in the next few days to a community in Hawaii on the Big Island created to support musicians who wish to live in a peaceful, creative way in a closed environment of visionary artistic people.  He is moving to…a utopia.

Come to think of it, the idea of an enclosed, special environment where like-minded creative people can live and study and work is also attractive to me.  I am considering a doctoral program on the West Coast (Santa Barbara) at Pacifica Graduate Institute–looking into their Mythology Ph.D Program which would be an exciting fit with my qualitative research and archetypal work.  Pacifica is the university connected with Joseph Campbell and specializes in archetypes, depth psychology, and the mythic vision.  In a sense, I have interest in the concept of a visionary academic community as utopia.

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As 2012 is progressing in what seems to be a creative way, I’ve decided to create and post a series on interesting, powerful creative techniques.  These are creativity processes available to and utilized by smart thinkers, researchers, marketers, or creative people–from photographers, musicians, artists, composers, poets, insight managers, videographers, healers, to new product developers–as they generate new ideas and seek to execute them skillfully among the target audiences who need, will appreciate, buy, and frequently use them.

When an opportunity or problem appears–and needs a unique, powerful solution–it is valuable to use a problem solving tool that has been developed, finetuned, and tested by visionary creative experts.

My Creative Techniques Series starts with Creative Problem Solving.  CPS is a process authored, safeguarded, and taught by The Creative Education Foundation, originally founded by the brainstorming expert Alex Osborne in the early 1900s and the visionary man who collaborated with Alex, adding his own dimensions, i.e., Sid Parnes.  An entire institute starting from these two creative visionaries grew into a worldwide movement of creativity and problem solving now practiced by thousands of graduates.

I spent a month every summer for 8 years going to CPSI and now use its CPS process for many of my creative projects.  One can use the process as is or combine it with other tools and techniques.

CPS has six phases all called “Finding” that allow a problem to evolve from definition stage through exploration of what lies behind it into totally new ideas, then selection of the best ideas to make viable solutions, and, finally, ways to tighten, solidify, and create support for the solution.

Here it is:  CPS

As Dr. Sid Parnes has taught:  In applying the “steps” of CPS, what you’re really trying to do is to proceed from examining “what is” to exploring “what might be,” to judging “what ought to be,” to assessing “what can presently be,” to deciding “what I will commit to do now,” to action that becomes a new “what is.”

For more information, go to the Creative Education Foundation website.

Try the sequence of six finding stages and see what happens.  Take an issue, problem, goal, or situation that seems initially to be a complete “mess”…that has no good ideas, solutions, or ways to manifest itself successfully…or that you feel frustrated by–you’ve tried everything and nothing is working.  Take the mess or issue through these six sequences.  You can do it alone, with a team, or get together with another colleague.  It is guaranteed that you will discover a breakthrough–something new and powerful that you had not thought possible at the outset.

Sometimes it happens that the solution is just redefining the problem.  As James Wells of Toronto has suggested, “The answer is in the question.”   Good researchers know this but sometimes we forget or don’t have time to examine the foundations of a project before we launch into it.  We discover that the problem one comes in with is not the one that needs to be solved.  This problem-redefinition step can save valuable time and effort, as well as eliminate days, weeks, and countless months of frustration.

A recent case history:  I was doing a research project in Chicago in late December, showing new white-card concepts to focus groups segmented by two psychographic categories.  There were 20 concepts, and we were trying to show at least 8 or 9 per group.  It was a fast-and-furious, make-it-happen, do-it brilliantly qualitative project.   Three of the ideas–each idea took 10 to 15 minutes to gain reaction to it from the group, so it was almost 30 minutes of the precious 2 hours per group–were for solutions to a well-known protein snack product that the creative team had assumed was a big problem to its users.  When lukewarm response greeted each of the three concept solutions, we finally realized that there was no problem at all to solve.  The original snack product was liked and accepted.   Those who purchased and ate it frequently…enjoyed it just as it was.  Those who didn’t…were unlikely to come in through our new solutions.  It was exciting to finally make this discovery, but a lot of research time was taken up trying to solve a problem that wasn’t a problem.

On the other hand, the discovery of what is a problem and what is not is frequently the main purpose behind a qualitative or quantitative research study.  One such study type is called Exploring Behaviors and Attitudes.  Another is Diagnosing Category Needs, Problems, and Potential White Space.  Both are good to conduct before starting the process of conceptualizing new ideas, creative tactics, and white card concepts.

If you don’t have the budget or time for a diagnostic study, do what some brands have done– use the CPS process to explore the issues, conceptualize new ideas, and come up with a winning solution without doing the foundational research. You can occasionally eliminate the need for research by choosing to begin with a creative methodology.

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