Mentored by Books Part I: Learning Synergy

Ghost Tree

We’ve lost the art of mentoring. It’s no longer an integral part of our culture. We see it only rarely. Even religion, which has held itself out to be a living, breathing way-maker has forgotten how to put flesh and blood to the mission of making disciples. The business world has some semblance of mentoring clinging to its culture. But that, alas, is so warped with its emphasis on bottom line that it’s not worth looking to as a model to emulate.

Being an introvert, hermitting myself away, comes quite naturally to me. So even if I had an irresistible urge to go out and find a mentor, it’s highly unlikely that it would be a successful quest.

And so my surrogate relationship with authors and their books has been more than sufficient. My first inkling that I was being mentored as I read was with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He “broke the fourth wall” when he turned to speak to me. It was a bolt of lightning. I eventually spoke back.

The next significant mentoring book in my life was The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination by John Livingstone Lowes. In it he shows something almost magical about Samuel Coleridge’s writing, the superhuman power he had to voraciously imbibe every tidbit of information he laid eyes on and to remember it. He then reveals Coleridge as a true alchemist, showing his ability to bring to bear the catalyst of synergy to his creations. The result was a new element in the Periodic Table of Literature, something that didn’t exist before. Coleridge’s collision of thought had created something brand new, The Poetic Big Bang.

Lowes spends over one thousand pages recounting the notes of Coleridge’s journals, giving them context and providing a reading list of their origins. It is an amazing study, as Lowes says, in the creative imagination of Samuel Coleridge.

I spent well over a year pouring through quotes, reference and Lowes interpretation of Coleridge’s creative process. My encounter with Coleridge’s work and his use of synergy of thought planted itself in my thinking. It became a strong nodule in a string of encounters with other work that reflected similar processes.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he talks about “thin-slicing.” Although in context he is referring to decision-making, the concept can be applied more broadly. He explains that thin-slicing is “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns” based on a very narrow slice of experiences. What I want to emphasize here is that the unconscious is where this “thin-slicing” takes place. For Coleridge and all who aspire to commune with the inner Muse, it’s a bold encouragement to grab those ghosts of recognition and their companions that float up from the unknown.

Brian Grazer’s book, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life is full of examples of the role curiosity has played in his life. Grazer is a producer, screenwriter and co-founder of Imagine Entertainment along with Ron Howard. He credits curiosity, which he calls his secret weapon and his superhuman power with opening significant doors of opportunity in his life. One of the themes that runs through the book is how curiosity became a means of following a thread from one discovery to the next in a pattern of synergy.

These chance encounters of mine with books, and their authors by extension, extolling the value of synergy have provided important reinforcement for a principle to take root, the merit of recognizing and following synergistic threads. As a result my understanding of the world has expanded – exponentially.

That’s the way synergy works. Seed thoughts being planted side-by-side, becoming a forest and eventually creating a biosphere. That’s where stories are born and thrive, in a biosphere of synergy. That's where life proliferates on its own and stories tell themselves.

Everything really is connected in some way. As our glance becomes a gaze we discover what those connections mean. This is one of the more important tools in our writer’s toolbox.

What seed thoughts are becoming a forest for you?

Writing Prompt For The Week: Ghosts of Thought