ANEW: Living For the City
The way to remind ourselves we are creative beings is to create ourselves every day.
In July, I moved to Manchester, NH. The rationale was I needed time to rest and clear my mind before jumping into another substantial position in a school right away. And while I had more than a few “concepts of a plan,” the idea of making something entirely new and different after 34 years in the same industry was thrilling.
So, I started looking for apartments in May of 2024, which I secured almost immediately at one of the Loft Mill Buildings in Manch-Vegas, which is what Manchester, NH, is known by many – jokingly, lovingly, and derisively. I hired movers and got out of Dodge. By Dodge, I mean Andover, NH, which I had come to love, too. After all, I was sad to leave the students and my colleagues and equally bereft to leave my friends in the Village of Andover, on the Planning Board, and the folks at the various restaurants and gas stations with whom I had made fast friends.
When you want to provide a different way of seeing and being, you must disrupt the paradigm and find new routes and routines to create and iterate. Plus, I was tired. After nearly thirty-five years of working in the same industry, I theorized that I could use some time to reflect before starting the act of creation again.
For those people not in the school business, being in a school can be tremendously creative. I think of colleagues like Sue Houston of Proctor Academy or Jennifer Garner of MICDS, who often made new material shine for students through their creative and innovative practices. Jennifer is an Art Teacher for the lower grades, inviting distinguished artists like Cbabi Bayoc into her classes to work alongside her students. At the same time, Sue teaches chemistry to high school students, using the pond outside of her classroom door to have students conduct original research across the various science disciplines.
In the main, schoolwork is an act of ultimate creation, or it can be for those educational practitioners who choose to see it that way. More than anything, each teacher-creator attempts to instill the kind of “atomic habits” in their students that might be used for years and decades to come in the rest of their lives in and outside of a classroom. For some students, the habit created may mean going to see an artist’s open studio in Redhook, Brooklyn, after reading about them in a local newspaper. For others it may mean asking deep questions about the ancient infrastructure in the water system in their small town in Central Michigan. Teachers help to model question-asking and creative insight in lifelong learners.
The atomic habits process means creating new systems by starting with small incremental changes that might lead to some breakthroughs later. Perhaps it’s taking a walkabout in the city every morning or joining an early morning writing group to plant the seeds for something new. Recreation starts with getting out of your head and into something new daily. The premise is that atomic habits begin with a focus on changing yourself incrementally while stacking other habits to solidify the changes you want to make. It is a way of seeing “different.”
When I cruise around my new city and speak to the people who remember what Manchester was like twenty-five years ago, most people say it was a place that had seen better days. Indeed, a few entrepreneurial people and large organizations have come in to help speed the process, stacking their atomic habits next to each other. Like the teachers mentioned above, some of the most incredible changes I have observed in my new city, even since my arrival, are about encouraging local business owners to set up shop within another’s shop. One such curious man started a coffee shop at my favorite local independent bookstore, The Bookery. Proba Coffee was born inside a well-established local bookstore to provide proof of concept for their industrial-size coffee roastery on the other side of town. Ryan, the owner of the coffee shop, told me that he and his business partners started Proba to bring his idea of what great-tasting coffee can be to a small city. His industrial-size coffee roastery is now in 300 stores throughout the Midwest. However, giving people locally a way to sample his product was his passion for a long time. Now he gets to see it come to life.
Witnessing the craft and good work of so many people in my life over the years inspires me to go further, sailing to the various ports of my life’s voyage. I am reminded of the Latin motto from a former school where I worked in the Bay Area, which is “Scire Desidero – I Desire to Know.” Being in and out of school can teach you much.
In every place and space where I have lived, I have desired to do the same, to know more and be more. We are put on this earth to make the lives of the people we touch better. Sometimes we do not always get it right. In creating our own lives, we can send the lives of others we have touched — and loved — off in a different direction, like atoms ricocheting against each other. Yet, if our intention is true, to do no harm, the reactions we create will settle and, finally, form new lives waiting to be born.
Curated Listening:
The artist known as Prince lived a life of self-creation and recreation. One of those ultimate times of creation, and there were many for Prince, was when he amazed other guitarists at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 for a tribute to George Harrison, who had just passed away, playing Harrison’s "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Watch as Prince shreds, doing a trust fall into the audience, and at the end, throwing his guitar up into the air, and walks off the stage, mic drop-style, to thunderous applause. Does the guitar ever come back down? To see the entire performance in its entirety, watch it HERE.
Lovely essay Brian. Thanks for the shout out. Incredible guitar riff by beloved Prince!