"Creativity is just problem solving."

Creativity is just problem solving.

That quote, from the utterly awesome Ed Catmull, is included in an article in the current Sept 2016 Reader's Digest on how a team of creatives transformed Frozen from flop to fabulous.  

The article got me thinking about how differently people approach the challenge of America's Boomers pushing past the traditional retirement age, into their 70s, anticipating their 80s, 90s, 100.  Considering how too many youngers treat today's olders elders ancients.

Seems to me that most people who are aware our generation's tick tock focus on what doesn't work.  If that had been the approach of the folks at Disney/Pixar, Frozen would have crashed & burned on release - if it had gotten that far.   

Instead, the ORIGINAL team - not a replacement - was instructed to forget what didn't work, to instead envision their biggest hopes for the film.  Move past details - what sort of STORY did they want to play out on the screen?

Different people were drawn to different aspects within the story, but as a team they realized the adversarial aspects fails while what moved the heart forward were the relationships - and their barriers, perceptions, misunderstandings, closely hidden secrets, misrepresentation & unexpected interplay.  

Peter Del Vecho noted, "We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true."

That thought stopped me in my tracks, thinking about how woefully messed up our American culture seems around practically every aspect of inching upward in age.  

The challenge our nation faces is that the very people driving private perception & public policy around "aging in America" are the absolute worst ones to put in the driver's seat.  Men & women still wading through the muck & mire of middle age, an age marked with fear of growing older, with almost nil vision of what is ahead, misunderstandings of the realities of getting significantly older, and the sorry fact that what little they know scares them witless.  

Ask THEM to spin the story they expect to play out & the storyboards will be filled with bleak, depressing, disabled imagery.  

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The Frozen team turned the flick around by turning to basics, drawing on their own experiences.  

Parts of their lives enabled them to imagine how Elsa felt, being constantly judged as abnormal for something that came naturally to her.  They transformed Elsa's reality into opportunity for growth rather than judgement - from others & herself.  Because they could relate to her truth.  Alas, middlers are the last ones who can relate to the realities of tipping their way into their 60s, 70s & well beyond. 

Here's about as good a description of the sense that most folks locked into middle age have toward their elders as I've ever come across - “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.”  (Donald Richie)

Those very middlers are the ones who THINK they know what happens as others age out of their 50s & into a reality - retirement - their produce produce produce brains can't envision as anything less than a fate worse than death.  

Task them with going off with their faulty life script, reconsider their basic premise, come back with something closer to the mark?  They'd fail because most can't get their heads around what they've never experienced.  Fewer & fewer have actual regular, day-to-day, casual & connected experience with people outside their own age.  

If they are stuck at "Is this all?", imagine what they project olders to be feeling!

Harking back to their own experiences is what got Frozen on track, but the team was still flummoxed when it came to finding a satisfying ending. To do that required a shake up, with the writer taking on the additional role of second director.   

When it comes to changing the flailing script around growing older in America, voices that have always been there need to drawn into the discussion  - olders elders ancients.  

The article talks about how the team discovered the end had to be about love being stronger than fear.  I'd tweak that for how our abysmal culture misreads edging upward past our middle into really up there - it's about LIFE being stronger than fear.  

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Ed was right - "Creativity is just problem solving."  While there's still time to right the mess that America has made of how we tend to envision growing older elderly ancient, the window of opportunity won't stay open forever.  If we don't use all our creativity to turn this problem around, our children will treat us even worse that the current youngers regard much older family & friends.   

As an almost older myself - 02/07/17 - am invested in turning the storyline of my seriously-up-there in years from a bomb into a smash hit that delights all generations.  As Pete Del Vecho said, "We can always find the right story when we start asking ourselves what feels true."   

We need to help the thought leaders & policy makers that impact our nation's culture around aging get the true stories of being up there in years, the perspectives that run counter to their own intuition, to spark a creativity in ALL of us that will solve the problem for current & future generations.

They need to see all that folks my age & those far older can do, to bust out of false images of bogus limits, to break through to a greater appreciation of the fact that older age holds more happiness than they can literally imagine where they are, currently frozen in false images of aging!  

May all such youngers get to the point where each can see the gifts that are only accessible to olders elders ancients, where each gets to the point where he or she can sing out, with clarion belief & uplifted heart - "The old never bothered me, anyway!"