What I Learned from Yael

Yael tells me how she does new things. She puts bits and pieces together. 

She hears a bit of a story on the street. 

She goes into a meeting and here’s a piece of information.  The bits and pieces float and dance. Sometimes they create a new entity that gets a life of its own, and bumps into other bits and pieces. 

It could be something at work, something with the children.

I ask her to create something now. 

“Bits and pieces

New Years greetings for the children. 

The pain in her belly button.”

The belly button is like the center of universe for all the bits and pieces coming together in her mixer. Then something sprouts. Straight out of the belly button. “Isn’t that where Athena came out of?” she asks. 

Like children. 

The process has different movements, it describes everything she does. 

Today she wrote New Years greetings to her children. They are presented to their children at school. Her little one is six. She just learned to roller blade, in an instant. So she took a picture of her roller-blading and used this sense of roller blading, it took her to new letters and new meaning. Her daughter is now in the process of rolling through life. 

Yael’s older son is ten. She takes her phone and shows me a bunch of little animakins. She hopes her son will be full of magic, imagination and invention. He is an inventor. He collects. He could be the curator of the museum of the creatures of the twenty-first century. He collects each wave of creatures that crawl their way onto the shelves of stores. 

Yael likes to study. She collects. Just like collecting mushrooms. She grew up with her Dad and they picked mushrooms together. Picking mushrooms is like a treasure hunt, combined with a nature trek.  You need a sharp eye, and there is an element of competition. On the way you find a lot of things you weren’t looking for.  

“How do you look for things you’re not looking for,” I ask her.  She says it’s simple, “You don’t look for them. You just are present and they appear. You can miss them in the blink of an eye”. 

According to Yael, creating something is like playing a jam session. She doesn’t play instruments, but it always interested her. You have to be listening to what is going on around you, to let it flow in, but at the same time you have to let yourself express. She says “It’s chaos with a tune”. 

I met Yael at an education conference a while back. We didn’t know that each other existed. But we noticed, we seized the oppportunity.

Sometimes people miss out. They miss finding treasures. They are focused on what they need to do, they meet the people they think they should meet.  

In summary, according to Yael, you need to find the middle path. To be focused and unfocused at the same time. It’s all in the flow.