In my California village, just across from the park that has the statues of Yoda and Indiana Jones, there’s a huge mural emblazoned with the words “Choose Kindness.” Whenever I feel overwhelmed by current events, I wander over and gaze at it awhile, reminding myself that despite what we read in the headlines, most people still think kindness is a pretty good idea.
The 32 artists who co-created the mural are living proof a diverse group of humans can still get along with one another to do something worthwhile. It’s comforting to know that cooperation and altruism, the survival techniques that have stood us in good stead for two million years, are still alive and well, even among the famously free-spirited non-conformists who make up the art world.
Art is all about upending ideas we take for granted. Remember Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, with his melting clocks? He claimed his mustaches were functioning antennas, ate vast quantities of camembert cheese before bed to give himself exotic dreams, and went everywhere with a pet ocelot. Not to be outdone, Oscar Wilde started going everywhere with a pet lobster on a leash. Frida Kahlo slept beside her pet deer. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Artists and innovators bring fresh perspective to the world because they see things differently. Today, many people we admire — Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Greta Thunberg, and Sir Isaac Newton, to name but a handful — are viewed as being neurodiverse. According to Harvard Medical School, neurodiversity “is the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways; there is no one ‘right’ way of thinking, learning, and behaving, and differences are not viewed as deficits.”
One of the best reasons to love San Anselmo’s kindness mural is that it was spearheaded by Cedars of Marin, which has been a pioneer in nurturing neurodiverse individuality for more than a century. What started in 1919 with classes for four young women today involves 200 adults in residential and day programs in 13 locations, all designed to foster independence, dignity, and self-respect in a community where everyone is valued.
“Cedars is a place where people feel safe and are able to thrive,” Executive Director Chuck Greene told the Pacific Sun. “They are actively engaged in our community — from one resident who eats dinner with our local firemen every evening, to another who sings in a local choir. We want to show the world that our participants are an enriching and valuable part of the community as neighbors, artists, volunteers and more.”
Many Cedars artists contributed their talents to the kindness mural. Just around the corner from it, Cedars runs a gallery called The Artist Within, which sells their drawings, paintings, sculptures, jewelry, puppets, papier-mâché figures, and textiles. Rich and I often linger at the shop window to admire the latest offerings. A few years ago, Rich surprised me by walking through the door with this painting under his arm, announcing the tiger had come to live with us.
I know, right? Ya gotta love that grin. The world would be a lesser place without it, that’s for sure.
I always figured it had to be fun working with such artists, and last week Daniel Krakauer, who has served as one of Cedars’ art facilitators for ten years, said it certainly was.
“I was at a place in my life where I needed to find work,” he told me. “So I started volunteering at Cedars to see if it was a good fit. I instantly felt pulled in by the artists and the creative freedom I saw there. I had been a practicing artist and had taught art a little, but being an art facilitator was new to me.”
I had to ask. “What is an ‘art facilitator’?”
“There is not a set of techniques or a body of knowledge I am trying to teach. It is about following the artist’s inclinations and helping them find and express their unique voices.”
“Active creativity is inherently therapeutic,” Daniel said. “There’s a sort of meditative solace. Some of these guys come five days a week. They’ve been coming for decades. So it’s a very deep practice. I’m always amazed; with so many of them, there’s no hesitation. It’s very pure and free and uncomplicated.”
This is what the legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow,” those golden moments when we feel deep enjoyment, abundant creativity, and a total connection with life. His groundbreaking book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience showed that you don’t have to be painting the Mona Lisa to experience it. Even ordinary tasks, like working in an industrial bakery, can get you there if you approach them openheartedly, with enthusiasm, creativity, and playfulness.
Just look at the playfulness in Picasso’s almost cartoonish cubism, Jackson Pollack’s wild splashes of paint, Yayoi Kusama’s bold shapes and colors. You can see why people say, “Hey, my kid could paint that!”
We’re all wired a bit differently. And that’s a good thing! Just think how boring life — and art — would be if we all thought and acted precisely alike. Yes, cooperation helps us survive, but excessive conformity is fraught with danger. We risk losing our sense of identity, the habit of critical thinking, and the courage of our convictions — all things we need to make good decisions in a complex world.
This type of excessive conformity was dubbed “groupthink” by social psychologist Irving Janis in 1972, when he was exploring the question of why groups of highly intelligent individuals often made bad decisions. Janis identified symptoms of groupthink such as unquestioning belief in the group’s decisions, vilifying anyone who disagrees, and the presence of “mindguards,” people who block alternative information from entering the discussion. Thanks heavens we live in more enlightened times now and this kind of stuff no longer happens! (And yes, I am being ironic.)
Luckily for us, we still have art. And one of the great gifts art offers us is a way to communicate ideas that bypass our conscious minds and enter directly into our hearts. And stay there forever.
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way… things I had no words for,” said Georgia O’Keeffe. Or as Pablo Picasso put it, “The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ”
A recent study confirmed what those words suggest: viewing powerful art lets us experience the world through another’s eyes, inspiring us to feel connection and empathy. From there, it’s easy to find ourselves on the path to helping one another. Let the cynics scoff, I’m standing with the two million years of cooperative evolution that tell me kindness is the smart choice.
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