Last time we explored the relationship between learning another language and its effects on one’s health, especially in its ability to prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s. Today I am going to share my own personal experience with learning another language and its effects on my creativity.
In 1999, halfway through my graduate school studies in architecture, my girlfriend and I scheduled a trip down to Costa Rica to surf and take some language classes. For the most part, I loved being in school. But I also felt out of balance, putting in long hours, often sleeping at school after following a design idea late into the night.
Around that same time, I found myself at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, looking at a painting. I don’t remember much about the painting except that it was abstract and primarily red in color. What I do remember is how I felt looking at it: awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. All the while, a single thought repeated itself in my mind, “What am I supposed to know about this painting?”
While in Costa Rica, I had very little sense about what I was supposed to know or supposed to be doing. I simply felt alive. I felt both enlivened and relaxed by the tropical environment, by my time spent in the ocean, and by the joys and challenges of navigating a foreign culture that spoke a different language than my own.
For five days, I attended a half day of language immersion classes taught by a woman from Bolivia. We were taught the very basics, the things I take totally for granted speaking with another English speaker. As my mind tried to conjugate verbs, and my mouth wrestled with the strong vowels and rolling “r’s”, I felt the joy of basic connection. I also felt inspired, filled with wonder and curiosity, which are two of the most important qualities for creativity and creative expression.
Next time I’ll get into the night in Costa Rica that changed my life, that set me in a whole new direction, a direction that ignited my creativity and rescued it from any sense of what I thought I should be knowing or doing…