Composing a Life: How Turbo Thinkers Can Embrace a Jazz Mindset
Last week, while visiting the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), I was immediately captivated by the exhibit "John Scott: Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape" in the Great Hall. Scott's monumental woodcut prints, which capture the very soul of New Orleans, confronted me in a stimulating and thought-provoking way. As I studied his work, I couldn't help but notice how his creative process embodied the concept of "spherical thinking," a non-linear approach to simultaneously looking at the past, present, and future. This idea resonated with me as a Turbo Thinker©, and I began to see parallels between Scott's artistic mindset and the way our minds work.
To create each print, Scott carved into the surface of large sheets of plywood with a power saw and routing tools, creating lines and forms that are impressionistic yet visually imposing. The composite nature of these prints exemplifies Scott's jazz-inspired explorations of spherical thinking. Like a jazz musician, Scott improvised, riffed, and layered elements to create a cohesive whole that tells a story — in this case, the story of New Orleans.
The Turbo Thinking© brain excels at divergent thinking — we can start with a prompt and generate a multitude of solutions. Our thoughts are more like fireworks or popcorn than a straight line on a track. We see unusual connections where others may not, linking ideas in unexpected ways that may resemble a tangled yarn more than a linear progression. Yet, when we understand its strength, this thinking process can serve us in countless ways.
The human brain allows us to reminisce about the past, reliving positive memories; to delight in the miracle of the present moment; and to dream and wonder about the future's exciting possibilities. An unmanaged Turbo Thinking© brain, however, might wander into remembering an unpleasant experience, using that negative emotion to color the present and create anticipatory anxiety about a dreaded future. Like fortune tellers, we might believe in this catastrophic demise to the point of freezing all action, ruminating and stuck in avoidant behavior that sabotages our progress.
But what if we thought like jazz musicians, employing techniques like contrafact, where a new melody is composed over an existing chord progression? What if we chose a mindset that simultaneously looks at our past, present, and future, selecting better stories to compose a more beautiful life? Turbo Thinkers© are natural, non-linear, spherical thinkers. Different scenes from our past, present, and future can evoke a spectrum of emotions — often a collage of fear, anger, anxiety, and depression. But what if we could choose a better emotional state and reverse engineer the process? What if we called an old friend and asked them to tell us a joke? Or watched butterflies dance on milkweed in the garden? Or cranked up our favorite Pride playlist and let ourselves dance? Or let our slobbery dog lick our face? Once we shift into a more positive emotional state, we can more easily retrieve positive pieces from our past, present, and future to collate and assemble.
We Turbo Thinkers© can do something similar to the contrafact technique — we can find those sections of our story that make us feel confident and joyful and use them to inspire a new future. We can select the best bits of our past to infuse the present with magic and possibility, crafting a new composition that delights us — a life that's music to our ears, a true jazz composition that uplifts our soul.
As Turbo Thinkers©, we have the agency to create a better life for ourselves. Our minds are like those of jazz composers, capable of improvising, riffing, and layering elements to create a cohesive whole. At any moment, we can choose the elements that best serve us to design a lifestyle that brings joy and fulfillment to ourselves and those around us. We are, in fact, artists responsible for composing the mood and message we want to evoke in our lives. So, what if we embrace our inner jazz composer? What if we experimented with the layering of thoughts and ideas, played with different combinations, and saw what masterpiece emerged? The world is waiting for our unique composition — how will we make it truly soul-stirring?