Sfumato:
Let Your Intuition Guide You
How comfortable are you with ambiguity? Are you comfortable not knowing, or do you demand certainty? Learn how intuition can guide you.
Andre Gide on Creativity
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” — André Gide
Explore the Unknown With Curiosità
When you ask questions about your life, you’ll get answers you may not expect. The answers may excite you, but chances are, they’ll also scare you out of your wits. Suddenly you’re overwhelmed with new choices — What? You? Give a presentation at the annual shareholders’ meeting? You? Drive through Europe? Alone?
Yes. You.
When you start to think like Leonardo, you’ll be bounced out of your comfort zone. Sfumato — which means “turned to mist ” or “up in smoke” in Italian — demands that you live with courage. That’s not to say that you’ll always be courageous: we all do our ‘fraidy-cat imitations now and then. In fact, let’s come right out and say it: “You’re allowed to be anxious and scared.” It’s what you do with these feelings that counts.
Your reward for battling through the smoke of uncertainty and accompanying anxiety is a priceless gift: the knowledge that you can always, always trust your intuition.
Let’s get started.
Tour the Virtual Museum
Sfumato is a term that art critics coined to refer to the hazy, mysterious quality in Leonardo’s paintings, a quality he achieved through the gossamer-thin application of hundreds of layers of paint so that the light seems to suffuse magically from behind the canvas. Explore the third floor of our Virtual Museum to see examples of Leonardo’s mastery of Sfumato.
[Flash Animation: Think Like Leonardo DaVinci Museum, 3rd Floor Window]
Your List of Life Questions
In the Curiosità chapter of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, the “A Hundred Questions” exercise on page 59 asked you to make a list of 100 questions that are important to you. Have you made the list? If not, make the list now. It’s important to create the entire list in a single session.
Here’s how to do it:
- Close your office door and turn off the phone
- Take out your notebook
- Play some relaxing music
- Set a timer for 45 minutes
- Start writing your list of questions. Remember, you only have 45 minutes!
When you’ve finished your list, read through it and make a list of themes you’ve explored in your questions. Do this without judging: don’t label themes as either trivial or valuable. Keep an open mind as much as possible.
Finally, select your Top Ten Questions from your list of 100, and rank them in order.
Visually Journaling Your Uncomfortable Questions
Which of your Top Ten questions makes you most uncomfortable? Michael Gelb suggests that you use a visual journaling technique to give a shape to the feelings that these questions arouse in you.
Try it. Pick a question. Wait until you’re alone, put on some music, and, using art materials like oil pastels or charcoal and without thinking at all, doodle/sketch the emotion that the question arouses in you. When you sketch, you’re inviting your right brain, which is non-verbal, to communicate with your logical left-brained self.
This is an intense exercise. You’ll find yourself gaining further insights in days to come: be sure to record your insights in your notebook. Also, keep your notebook on your bedside table, so that you can record your dreams; these will provide further answers to your Top Ten questions.
How Comfortable Are You With Ambiguity/Anxiety?
Read “Make Friends with Ambiguity” and “Observe Anxiety” on pages 152-153 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, and then do the exercises. Working intensely with your life questions inevitably triggers anxiety. If you feel that, like many creative people, you’re having trouble handling anxiety (symptoms can range from butterflies in your tummy to heart palpitations) be sure to get some professional help.
The Value of Confusion
“Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.” – Michael J. Gelb
Comfortable With Not-Knowing
Let’s not sugarcoat it: insecurity is not fun. If you’ve gone through unemployment, divorce, serious illness, or being a teenager, you already know this. Insecurity triggers immense stress that’s hard to handle. However, to think like Leonardo, you need to get used to the insecurity of ambiguity, of not-knowing.
One of my closest friends had a nervous breakdown triggered by prolonged intense stress. She says that her breakdown is the best thing that ever happened to her because it taught her how to handle anxiety. She says she’s more than comfortable with ambiguity now. She doesn’t have to know all the answers. She trusts that sooner or later, the answers she needs will come. Having had the courage to face her fears, her reward has been an unshakeable trust in her intuition. She winks when she maintains: “You know, call it what you like: intuition, God, inner self, it’s all the same thing.”
Getting to Know Your Shadow
The “I Am Not” exercise is a fun one. It allows you to be as judgmental as you like about your nearest and dearest. You may want to use loose-leaf paper and burn or shred the pages when you finish. The purpose of the exercise is to become aware of some of your own projections.
Before you complete this exercise, read the exercise called “Cultivate Confusion Endurance” on page 154 of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, and note the section on Good and Evil, in which Gelb mentions the Jungian concept of shadow. Learning to recognize your own shadow qualities will make you more comfortable with uncertainty and less judgmental.
Projection is an interesting psychological process in which we involuntarily project our unconscious behavior onto others. When this happens, we believe that the qualities we’re projecting actually exist in the other person. For example, you have a close friend with many lovely qualities, but she’s a whiner of the first order. Although you love her dearly, you wish that she’d stop bitching about trivialities.
Some psychologists suggest that, “we only recognize that which we are.” This is the grown-up version of “it takes one to know one.” So in the case of our beloved whining friend, we’re projecting our own complaining nature onto her, because it’s too threatening for us to confront this directly in ourselves.
For a weekend, or a week if you like, make notes about what you dislike most about the people you come into contact with. Include your family, partner, and colleagues. (Be as cruel as you like, because after all, you’re really describing yourself.)
At the end of the weekend, make a list of your most-hated attributes, prefacing each quality with “I am not,” as in:
- I am not sarcastic
- I am not petty
- I am not stingy
- I am not a whiner
- I am not chronically late
- I am not mathematically challenged
This exercise will not automatically enable you to recognize all your projections; it will, however, help you to see where you’re projecting, and it should help to smooth some of your rockier relationships.
Now we’ve faced our demons, let’s get our reward: intuition.
More Intuition to Come
In Lesson 6, Arte/Scienza, and in Lesson 7, Corporalita, we’ll discover more tools you can use to become acquainted with your intuition. Lesson 6 is important intuition-wise, because intuition seems to be a feature of your right brain. Lesson 7 is important for your intuition because your intuition will normally present as a feeling somewhere in your body: as a “gut” feeling, for example.
Real-Knowing: Acknowledging Your Intuition
Intuition is a major component of creativity. In fact, unless and until you trust your intuition, you will dismiss your greatest inspirations.
In case you’ve ever doubted it, be assured that everyone is intuitive. Your intuition is known by many names and is often referred to as the right brain. Think back: did you ever think of an old friend you hadn’t seen for years, and then run into him at the movies? Or had a hunch that a horse would win, and told yourself, “Ah, it’s only a hunch,” and then have the four-legged beast actually win?
When asked how he gets his ideas, novelist Stephen King says that it’s a process of excavation. He digs out the novel he’s working on, which already exists, in the same way in which an archaeologist might excavate an ancient mosaic or an ancient building that has become buried under the sand and soil of millennia. In other words, Stephen King trusts his intuition.
Sfumato Self-Assessment
How much do you enjoy the foggier elements of life? Ask yourself the following questions:
- I enjoy traveling alone.
- I know that I will always have sufficient resources to meet my needs.
- I meditate on my death, as a reality check.
- I am comfortable talking to strangers.
- I enjoy my emotions, and am rarely overwhelmed by them.
- I often switch my cell phone off.
- I welcome anxiety as a sign of creative tension.
- I love jokes and puns.
Intuition Free-Write
This exercise is spooky. You’ll be shocked at how many of your predictions are accurate.
- Take out your notebook and a pen, or turn on your computer and start a new file. Write a list of questions, as few or as many as you please.
- Set a timer for 10 minutes. Play some relaxing music, and burn some aromatherapy oils if you wish.
- Close your eyes. For the purposes of this exercise, you are Mystic Mary (or Mystic Mike if you’re male). Visualize an enormous quartz crystal ball on the desk in front of you. The ball, which is half the size of a basketball, is your gateway to the Other Side. The ball has the answers to any questions you might want to ask it.
- Breathe deeply, then open your eyes, and start by writing: “The ball buzzes and hums on the desktop, and as it clears, I see a vision of . . . “
- Write down what you see. Perhaps you will see: a hidden garden, a valley in the Himalayas, or a deep cavern underneath the earth.
- Fully describe what you see, and close your eyes again. Imagine yourself inside the scene, in the ball.
- Open your eyes. Start the timer, look at your questions, and start answering them, one after another. It’s important that you don’t lift your pen from the paper, or your fingers from the keyboard. Just keep writing until the time’s up.
Keep your questions and answers somewhere safe. Share your accurate predictions with other students on the Message Board.
Moving Forward
Embracing Sfumato may be the hardest aspect of da Vincian thinking to integrate. It represents letting go of comforting (yet stifling) security blankets that many of us cling to for dear life. Please be gentle with yourself and remember that even taking baby steps in the direction of welcoming ambiguity is positive. Now is the time to learn to appreciate the changes you’ve already made and look forward to the ones you’ll continue to make.
This week’s assignment and quiz will help you take another look at the ambiguity of life and how to appreciate it. Please take the time to do both.
In Lesson 6, Arte/ Scienza, you’ll develop whole-brain thinking and learn Mind Mapping, a major skill that you’ll use for the rest of your life. Onward!
Assignment : Sfumato: Sensing Ambiguity
Go to page 85 of The How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci Workbook and complete the Sensing Ambiguity exercise.
To prepare for the next lesson, read pages 165-174 of How to Think Like Leonardo Vinci.
