The Little Radical

You know when you want to do something but feel constrained by The Situation? I'm at that juncture right now. You want to achieve This, but you only have that, not those other things you supposedly need. The creativity buzz-phrase Thinking Outside the Box comes to mind, but it's so overused people are putting it back in the box.

There's a new catch phrase in town: vuja de. Coined by Fast Company founding editor Bill Taylor, it's a twist on deja vu that essentially means, a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before. In other words, radical thinking required to get to the objective or to get to necessary change.

Children are a fine example of radical thinkers. Bear does this every day and I'm hoping he rubs off some radical on me. Look…

Last Christmas he was happy to get that gift. It was supposed to make a dog, but he wasn't interested in making a dog that day. He was in the mood to make a dinosaur. Now even if you give him dog parts, he'll still make that dinosaur. No problem.

Later on, he thought of making another kind of dinosaur with horns and showing some teeth. So here… horns and teeth. No problem.

In one of his surreal Lego scenes, he required a giant snail to drive a tugboat. None of his Lego sets have snails in them, and yet…

As Marcel Proust says, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes." Right, Baby Bear?