We’re also products of different cultures. (I’ve often thought of charging admission to some of our entertaining conversations: the optimistic, anything-is-possible American (me) exchanging views with the pessimistic Cold-War-era German from West Berlin.)

To cut through all of our (various, hilarious, absurd, genuine) objections to any proposed plan for having fun together, we’ve invented our own version of the blind date.

Here’s an example of how it works:

• He: “Gracie, what are you doing on Saturday night?”
• Me: (Shrugging) “Nothing, I guess. What’s up?”
  He: “Then we’ll leave around 7:45 – right after dinner.”
• Me: (Perking up) “Cool. What should I wear?”
  He: “Nice, but not fancy. And dress warmly.”
• Me: “You do that on purpose, don’t you? Just to torture me with too little information.”
• He: (Folds his arms and smirks)
• Me: “Oh, well. What do I care? If it’s a blind date, you’re paying, right?”
• He: “Yup.”

Our rules are:

• The person who invites pays (this minimizes objections from the invitee).
• The person who invites aims to please the invitee, even if unexpectedly so.
• The person who invites is not required to tell any more than is strictly necessary.
• The person who accepts the invitation doesn’t complain.

We’ve both been wowed and charmed as the “blind” person in the equation, escorted to experiences we’d never have chosen – or even agreed to – had we known in advance what they’d be. And we’ve both had the gleeful pleasure of the visionary escort, crafting experiences that delight us both.

Like traditional blind dates, our version opens up possibilities. Unlike the traditional version – thankfully – we know we’ll be spending time with someone we already love.

This version of blind dating works with all kinds of relationships, not only romantic ones. Evolve it for your own best use. And report back here, would you? I’d love to know how things go.

Flickr photo: Blind Light, by Anthony Gormley, on ricoeurian’s Flickr page as within the fog…

Related reading: Funny Practice, How to Mingle at a Party | Tips for the Timid

And if the map is imaginary, I’ll be lost. I’ll gladly roam the unfamiliar world, curious to discover not only another land but another mind.

These are (so far) my favourite sources for imaginary map adventures:

Strange Maps ~ I heartily thank the apparently anonymous creator of this website for regularly making me giggle, gape, and ogle. The author wrote this in the site’s long-ago first post: “I like maps. I like weird maps, the kind you won’t find in a regular atlas. Maps of countries that never existed – or never will exist. … here are the weirdest maps I found on the internet.”

Holly Lisle’s article “How I Drew a Map and Sold Three Books and a World” ~ Holly Lisle is one of my favourite online sources of writing encouragement and resources. Make sure to click on the little pictures in the article to see larger versions of her map creation.

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, by Katharine Harmon ~ I wish this book had been produced in a larger format. Nevertheless, the variety and oddness of the maps and the analyses offered make it a captivating gem well worth exploring.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel ~ Although this vast dictionary is not only (or even primarily) about maps, it does contain many maps of “the imaginary lands and cities of literature.” If you can’t quite picture a bird’s-eye-view of Narnia or the countries surrounding Oz, this dictionary will make it all clear.

Slightly off-topic bonuses:

The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical And Curious Maps, by Pepin Press ~ The maps in this book aren’t imaginary, but they’re so spectacular and strange that they might as well be.

The World of Donald Evans, by Willy Eisenhart ~ I’m a long-time fan of this odd, interesting man who died too young. He created and painted tiny, gorgeous postage stamps from countries he imagined.

Flickr photo: Early Morning Balloon Trip, by bestfor.

Related reading: Being Home, Pep Talk | Grope

William Gibson is well-known for his science fiction writing, which I love, but my favourite book of his is a non-science fiction novel. Pattern Recognition’s heroine, Cayce Pollard, is highly sensitive, and that plus Gibson’s mentally chewy writing has made me a happy re-reader of this novel.

Cayce Pollard is highly sensitive in a very particular way. Not only that, but she makes good money selling her sensitivity:

“Google Cayce and you will find ‘coolhunter,’ and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing.”

In all sorts of ways, Cayce endears. For those of us who are constantly fighting the fashion industry’s insistence on clothing tags that scratch and itch and generally get in the way to the point where we are as eager to cut off the label as we are the price tag once we get home, Cayce could be our champion. She takes fashion-provoked irritability to whole new levels:

“CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

“What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity threatens to spawn its own cult.”

But that’s not all there is to Cayce. Using her particular sensitivities and following her curiosities, she gets into odd and dangerous trouble, gets out again, makes friends, and solves mysteries.

Thanks to William Gibson’s skillful creativity, Cayce has a lot to offer as a role model for living the truth, for being ourselves – all freaky little quirks included.

British writer Tim Moore has charmed me thoroughly. He writes irreverent, utterly hilarious travel memoirs with the twist that he’s frequently and unabashedly incompetent at what he sets out to do.

My favourite Tim Moore adventure is told in French Revolutions, in which he hoists his unfit body onto a recently purchased bicycle and sets out to follow the route of the 2000 Tour de France six weeks before the real race begins. What follows is a tale of mishaps wound around Moore’s keen devotion to the lore of the Tour. Whether he’s begging his wife to drive over from England so he can get a ride up the Alps or cheapskating his way through France’s lesser known lodgings, he recounts his bumbling journey with enough muscle behind his wit to make me a devotee.

No, I’m not very interested in competitive sports in general or in the Tour de France in particular, but I’m hooked on any writing that makes me laugh out loud – and Tim Moore’s a professional in this regard.

“A big-faced man with a moist neck made me pay up front before entering my name with difficulty in his soiled register of the damned; as I trod carefully towards the lift he issued a two-tone grunt of dissent and without looking up thumbed at a dark stairwell. My fourth-floor window overlooked a forgotten courtyard full of dead pigeons and an avant-garde installation entitled One Hundred Years of the Fag End. Inside, the view wasn’t much better. The wardrobe was the size of a child’s coffin and contained a vegetable. Rolling back the tramp’s blanket on a bed of institutional design, I beheld a pillowcase that might have been used to filter coffee. But of course it hadn’t: after all, what’s the bathroom towel for? Still, clicking off the Bakelite switch with wet hands I wished I’d used it. The shock was so violent it flung me halfway to the bed – not bad seeing as the bathroom was a shared one right down the end of the corridor.”

~ Tim Moore, French Revolutions

My next favourite Tim Moore book is an earlier one called Frost on my Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer, in which he revisits the Victorian-era Arctic adventures of Lord Dufferin. Again, Moore exploits his own weaknesses for the sake of his readers’ glee. This time, the setting is colder. Beginning with a crossing to Iceland on a container ship and ending on Spitzbergen, a Norwegian island well into the Arctic Circle, Moore recounts his own trip along with the history of Dufferin’s, the two stories interweaving in starkly contrasting ways often involving Dufferin’s competence as compared to Moore’s.

“Going down was worse than going up, and somehow required me to bellow out a detailed live commentary of the movements of my limbs. By the time I staggered back to the road I was drenched with rain and sweat and walking like the infant Bambi.”

~ Tim Moore, Frost on my Moustache

I’ll be eternally grateful that Moore has been willing to sacrifice himself for the public’s benefit. Both books reside permanently in my toolkit for lightening up, since a reread of either provides a reliable fix.

“If you want to improve,
be content to be thought
foolish and stupid.”

~ Epictetus

Life’s a lab. We experiment, starting with a question (curiosity). Creativity is about risking mistakes in search of satisfying answers.

What we often mean when we say we’re not creative about something is that we’ve stopped trying. Even the most dazzling artist or engineer or sideways-thinking marketing executive or homeschooling parent or highly sensitive group leader has failed, in the sense of tried something that didn’t lead to the result they were questing for. But their reach exceeded their gasp. They reached again, tweaked the reach, tried again, and arrived at dazzle.

Creativity is about making a decision. It’s about deciding to play with possibilities. Or just deciding to play. Framing creativity as play can help take the seriousness of expectation out of the equation – a useful shift, since serious expectation often stifles the exact thing required by creativity’s mandate: try, try again.

The power of creativity – of play – for highly sensitive people is that it can cut through the particular challenges of being an HSP in a predominantly non-HSP culture. Creativity as a state of play relaxes and encourages, engages, lightens, frees us. And it connects us with what’s bigger than we are.

So grab the hooked end of a question mark and hang on until you’re flying in the direction you want to go. Every time you touch ground, try again. Pay attention to what made you land and try something different. Pile up the attempts and climb to the top and look around. And try again.

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

~ David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

When a friend recommended John Allen Boone’s Kinship with All Life to me fifteen years ago, I was intrigued enough to track it down. First published in 1954, this odd treasure was a revelation to read, not because Boone’s ideas about the ability of animals to communicate with us are new at the concept level, but because of the genuinely interested and loving way he details and validates our connection with animals.

The first part of Boone’s book chronicles his initial journey of discovery, which begins when he takes on the role of caretaker to Strongheart, a famous dog screen star. Using what he learns through his progressively closer and more communicative relationship with Strongheart, Boone goes on to discover connections with other species, from rattlesnakes to flies. His enthusiasm and great willingness to open up to other ways of understanding are instructive in themselves, and through his stories of the non-human lives that impact him, Boone shines as a learner who’s also a humble teacher.

“When we first began living together, my attitude toward Strongheart had been the conventional one. I assigned myself a place high in the scale of values because I was ‘a human,’ and gave him a place far below because he happened to be ‘a dog.’ I did this regardless of his unusual accomplishments, his world-wide fame and the large sums of money that he could earn for others. I had long been under the impression that while I lived in the upper levels of existence, all animals, not even excluding Strongheart, had to do their living on much lower and relatively unimportant mental and physical levels; and that between them and myself there could be certain rather limited service ties, but not much else. These ideas were to be radically changed.”

By the end of the book, Boone is helping a friend of his try to understand a fly that Boone has befriended and learned from, and which Boone calls Freddie.

“Thinking back over our friendship I could not recall a single instance in which the little fly had done even one of the antisocial things for which his kind are so ruthlessly hunted down and slaughtered. His character and behaviour patterns would have been commendable in a human.”

Although I feel as though my high sensitivity allows me to tune in on a deep level to animals as well as humans, Boone’s tales of cross-species communication took the possibilities of that tuning to a whole new realm.

John Allen Boone has also written other books on this topic, including Letters to Strongheart and Adventures in Kinship With All Life.

I’ve rarely read a book more gripping, whether fiction or non-fiction, and it’s gripping on many levels, from learning first-hand about the shipwreck from records left by survivors to being privy to Thompson’s creative process in trying to locate then recover the treasure to the mastermind tactics needed by Thompson and his crew to avoid the cutthroat competition from other treasure hunters closing in on their find. Gary Kinder shadowed Tommy and his crew to write this well-researched book and his words compellingly convey both the history and the action.

“For years [Tommy Thompson] had carefully cultivated a creative mind-set, worrying that if he ever stopped being different, if he ever stopped experimenting, if he ever stopped pushing and questioning and exploring and looking at life upside down, he would no longer think the thoughts that could lead him to ask the questions that no one else had asked, which is what made him unique, which is what allowed him to be what he had always wanted to be since he was a small boy: an inventor. He wanted to take old ideas, turn them inside out, and apply them in new ways; he wanted to suck the world through his senses and exhale a vision.”

By the end of Ship of Gold, I was full to the brim with mental pictures, replete with the reality brought to life by Kinder’s tale, and I was glad to let the book’s words inform my mind’s eye without outside assistance. Then I discovered Tommy Thompson’s America’s Lost Treasure, which is filled with stunning photographs.

By the time Donna and I sat on her couch and opened the cover of America’s Lost Treasure, we had both finished reading Ship of Gold. When we saw the lush photographs – of the treasure, the machines and equipment Thompson and his crew engineered, the crew itself, and more – we found ourselves laughing with the glee of being reunited with dear friends. We kept saying things like, “Look! There it is!” – as though we’d been on Thompson’s ship ourselves and were now looking at photos of our own journey. It felt like making the discoveries twice, getting double the pleasure from the story of the recovery of the “Central America.” Her story, told through Gary Kinder and Tommy Thompson, is history brought back to vivid life, a fascinating look inside the process of invention, and a window into the world of high-stakes treasure hunting.