The way to restore our capacity for wonder, says Booth, in The Everyday Work of Art, is by enhancing our ‘response-ability’. By ‘response-ability’, he means being alert to our own responses to things, whatever those responses might be.
‘In workshops,’ says Booth, ‘I am always struck by how hard it is for participants, of all ages, in all fields, to notice they are indeed having experiences. They do the activities, do them well, and have fine insights, but they resist considering what happens inside them during the experience as if it were important, worth noticing. Many have an ingrained bias that dismisses those inner events as inconsequential because they are intangible.’
I’m like those people in Booth’s workshops. I think instead of feel.
I was taken to an artist’s studio once, by a friend. There were six of us. The other five were artists. While they were flicking through a portfolio of abstract prints, I stood behind them, watching. The prints all looked the same to me, like rag-rolled wallpaper samples in blues and greens. The artists made polite noises as each page turned. I remained silent. But then, as the next page turned, the artists simultaneously cried out. I was startled. I couldn’t see anything different about this particular print. And yet, their reactions had been spontaneous.
I leaned closer to see if I, too, could see what they’d seen. But the page turned before I had chance. I knew they’d recognized something that, collectively, they had felt harmonious or good. And although I was seeing the same thing they were, I couldn’t feel what they could feel. This worried me. My failure didn’t feel like a deficiency of knowledge, but a deficiency of emotional or aesthetic sensibility – and I wasn’t sure that this sort of responsiveness could be learned.
Being responsive is hard work. It requires us to pay attention outside and inside, and to remain impartial while we do so. Our response-ability, says Booth, is to set aside our assumptions and our prejudices and genuinely perceive what we encounter. Genuine perception, says Booth, ‘requires a discipline to attend moment-to-moment without zooming off into the past or future and a capacity to read those moment-to-moment experiences for what they actually contain, in increasing complexity.’ This takes courage because it requires us to acknowledge all our responses, not just the pleasant ones.
But it’s worth it. As workshop participants are prompted to start noticing their experience,’ says Booth, ‘their awareness flashes in fragile and ephemeral glimpses. Slowly, participants get a sense that those inner events are full of important, surprising information and accomplishments. […] They come to respect experience-awareness as a skill that directly taps the feeling of being alive.’
It’s this responsiveness that guides us in creating our work, and our lives.
The Creative State of Mind 