I’m just back from two days of Yom Tov (Jewish holiday). During Yom Tov and Shabbat I am offline. Yom Tovs show up around three times a year, but Shabbat shows up every week. There are a whole host of things I don’t do on Shabbat with regard to using electricity, adjusting fires, driving, traveling long distances and the like.
With so much of what I do on line, and so many of the people I connect with far away this can be frustrating. However, even as I get frustrated with it it’s regularity and limits also are its strengths.
For one day a week I can’t close out the world with iPods and websites and the like. I can retreat to a book but the isolation is not as complete. Also with 26 hours, or like this weekend 49 or so there is so much time to do something with and so I think. Much of our networked always on life is a matter of mastering interrupts. I see it in the nature of videos, writing, communication. We go faster and faster and work more off of reaction than weighted thought because there isn’t time for that introspection. With Shabbat there is…plenty of it. Sometimes I take up that time with garbage – rehashing old things, what-ifing but that regularity and that limitation keeps bringing its pause, and occasionally I get to see patterns or have flashes of insight.
I don’t know that this weekend necessarily was as insightful as some, but as I went to write my post I thought of the limitation of Shabbat, and was reminded a brief quote by Warren Spector in Game Informer Magazine:
“We all felt like we were talented creative guys with big ideas, and if the big bad publishers would just get out of the way we can do amazing things. It just doesn’t work out that way. Real creativity happens within constraints, not without constraints”
Sometimes we rail at our constraints or the limitations of our situation, but sometimes those limitation can give us the boundaries we need for real creativity, real insight. Sometimes those breakthroughs are relatively minor, and sometimes they can be life transforming.
A real example of transforming limitations can be seen in the TED Video by William Kamkwamba. Without the ability to pay for school he turned to the books he could find. Without the language skills he learned from the pictures. Because of the need for water, he build a windmill for power and for water. His story is amazing, and well worth a watch.
