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I was hoping today to talk
a little bit about creativity.
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You know, a lot of people really struggle
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to give themselves
permission to be creative.
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And reasonably so.
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I mean, we're all a little suspect
of our own talent.
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And I remember a story
I came across in my early 20s
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that kind of meant a lot to me.
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I was really into Allen Ginsberg,
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and I was reading his poetry,
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and I was reading --
he did a lot of interviews --
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and one time, William F. Buckley
had this television program
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called "Firing Line,"
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and Ginsberg went on there
and sang a Hare Krishna song
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while playing the harmonium.
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And he got back to New York
to all his intelligentsia friends,
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and they all told him,
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"Don't you know that everybody
thinks you're an idiot,
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and the whole country's
making fun of you?"
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And he said, "That's my job.
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I'm a poet, and I'm going
to play the fool.
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Most people have to go
to work all day long,
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and they come home
and they fight with their spouse
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and they eat, and they turn on
the old boob tube,
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and somebody tries
to sell them something,
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and I just screwed all that up.
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I went on and I sang about Krishna,
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and now they're sitting in bed
and going, 'Who is this stupid poet?'
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And they can't fall asleep, right?"
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And that's his job as a poet.
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And so, I find that very liberating,
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because I think that most of us
really want to offer the world
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something of quality,
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something that the world
will consider good or important.
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And that's really the enemy,
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because it's not up to us
whether what we do is any good,
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and if history has taught us anything,
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the world is an extremely
unreliable critic.
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Right?
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So you have to ask yourself:
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Do you think human creativity matters?
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Well, hmm.
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Most people don't spend a lot of time
thinking about poetry. Right?
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They have a life to live,
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and they're not really that concerned
with Allen Ginsberg's poems
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or anybody's poems,
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until their father dies,
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they go to a funeral,
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you lose a child,
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somebody breaks your heart,
they don't love you anymore,
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and all of a sudden,
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you're desperate for making sense
out of this life,
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and, "Has anybody ever
felt this bad before?
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How did they come out of this cloud?"
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Or the inverse -- something great.
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You meet somebody and your heart explodes.
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You love them so much,
you can't even see straight.
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You know, you're dizzy.
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"Did anybody feel like this before?
What is happening to me?"
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And that's when art's not a luxury,
it's actually sustenance.
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We need it.
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OK. Well, what is it?
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Human creativity
is nature manifest in us.
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We look at the, oh ...
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the aurora borealis. Right?
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I did this movie called
"White Fang" when I was a kid,
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and we shot up in Alaska,
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and you go out at night
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and the sky was like rippling
with purple and pink and white,
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and it's the most beautiful
thing I ever saw.
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It really looked like the sky was playing.
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Beautiful.
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You go to Grand Canyon at sundown.
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It's beautiful.
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We know that's beautiful.
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But fall in love?
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Your lover's pretty beautiful.
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I have four kids.
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Watching them play?
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Watching them pretend to be a butterfly
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or run around the house
and doing anything,
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it's so beautiful.
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And I believe that we are here
on this star in space
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to try to help one another. Right?
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And first we have to survive,
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and then we have to thrive.
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And to thrive, to express ourselves,
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alright, well, here's the rub:
we have to know ourselves.
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What do you love?
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And if you get close to what you love,
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who you are is revealed to you,
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and it expands.
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For me, it was really easy.
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I did my first professional play.
I was 12 years old.
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I was in a play called "Saint Joan"
by George Bernard Shaw
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at the McCarter Theatre,
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and -- boom! -- I was in love.
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My world just expanded.
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And that profession --
I'm almost 50 now --
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that profession has never stopped
giving back to me,
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and it gives back more and more,
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mostly, strangely,
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through the characters that I've played.
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I've played cops, I've played criminals,
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I've played priests, I've played sinners,
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and the magic of this over a lifetime,
over 30 years of doing this,
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is that you start to see
that my experiences,
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me, Ethan, is not nearly as unique
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as I thought.
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I have so much in common
with all these people.
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And so they have something
in common with me.
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You start to see
how connected we all are.
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My great-grandmother,
Della Hall Walker Green,
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on her deathbed,
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she wrote this little biography
in the hospital,
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and it was only about 36 pages long,
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and she spent about five pages
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on the one time
she did costumes for a play.
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Her first husband got, like, a paragraph.
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Cotton farming, of which
she did for 50 years, gets a mention.
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Five pages on doing these costumes.
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And I look -- my mom gave me
one of her quilts that she made,
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and you can feel it.
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She was expressing herself,
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and it has a power that's real.
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I remember my stepbrother and I
went to go see "Top Gun,"
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whatever year that came out.
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And I remember we walked out of the mall,
it was, like, blazing hot,
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I just looked at him,
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and we both felt that movie
just like a calling from God.
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You know? Just ...
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But completely differently.
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Like, I wanted to be an actor.
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I was like, I've got to make something
that makes people feel.
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I just wanted to be a part of that.
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And he wanted to be in the military.
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And that's all we ever did
was play FBI, play army man,
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play knights, you know,
and I'd like, pose with my sword,
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and he would build a working crossbow
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and he could shoot an arrow into a tree.
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So he joins the army.
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Well, he just retired
a colonel in the Green Berets.
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He's a multidecorated combat veteran
of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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He now teaches a sail camp
for children of fallen soldiers.
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He gave his life to his passion.
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His creativity was leadership,
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leading others,
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his bravery, to help others.
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That was something he felt called to do,
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and it gave back to him.
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We know this -- the time
of our life is so short,
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and how we spend it --
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are we spending it
doing what's important to us?
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Most of us not.
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I mean, it's hard.
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The pull of habit is so huge,
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and that's what makes kids
so beautifully creative,
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is that they don't have any habits,
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and they don't care
if they're any good or not, right?
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They're not building a sandcastle going,
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"I think I'm going to be
a really good sandcastle builder."
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They just throw themselves at whatever
project you put in front of them --
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dancing, doing a painting,
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building something:
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any opportunity they have,
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they try to use it to impress upon you
their individuality.
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It's so beautiful.
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It's a thing that worries me sometimes
whenever you talk about creativity,
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because it can have this kind of feel
that it's just nice,
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you know, or it's warm
or it's something pleasant.
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It's not.
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It's vital.
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It's the way we heal each other.
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In singing our song,
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in telling our story,
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in inviting you to say,
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"Hey, listen to me,
and I'll listen to you,"
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we're starting a dialogue.
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And when you do that,
this healing happens,
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and we come out of our corners,
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and we start to witness
each other's common humanity.
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We start to assert it.
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And when we do that,
really good things happen.
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So, if you want to help your community,
if you want to help your family,
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if you want to help your friends,
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you have to express yourself.
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And to express yourself,
you have to know yourself.
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It's actually super easy.
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You just have to follow your love.
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There is no path.
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There's no path till you walk it,
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and you have to be willing
to play the fool.
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So don't read the book
that you should read,
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read the book you want to read.
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Don't listen to the music
that you used to like.
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Take some time to listen
to some new music.
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Take some time to talk to somebody
that you don't normally talk to.
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I guarantee, if you do that,
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you will feel foolish.
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That's the point.
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Play the fool.
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(Plays guitar)
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(Sings) Well, I want to go Austin,
and I wanna stay home.
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Invite our friends over
but still be alone.
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Live for danger.
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Play it cool.
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Have everyone respect me
for being a fool.