COMING SOON: THE 700-POUND PINEAPPLE

What does a pineapple weigh?

And no, due to the incredibly personal nature of this podcast series, I will leave the wax museum format for several episodes to talk about an actual experience and how I responded and did not respond to a ramifications– But getting back to that pineapple…

According to the remarkably unreliable authority of my imagination, this particular pineapple weighed approximately 700 pounds.

It did not drop out of the sky.

It did not roll off the back of a produce truck.

And I did not attempt to carry it home from the supermarket.

Nevertheless, sometime during the summer, it landed squarely on my back.

At least, that is what it felt like.

In early September, as Celebrate Creativity begins a new podcast cycle, I will present a special five-part series:

The 700-Pound Pineapple.

This is the story of a back injury—but it is also the story of something much larger.

It is the story of what happens when the ordinary machinery of life suddenly breaks down.

Walking across a room becomes an expedition.

Getting out of bed becomes an engineering problem.

A duffel bag becomes an enemy.

A walker becomes a trusted companion.

A pillow becomes medical equipment.

And the distance between one side of the house and the other begins to feel roughly equivalent to the distance between Indianapolis and the North Pole.

Before my injury, I seldom thought about the enormous number of physical movements required to accomplish the simplest task. You stand. You bend. You turn. You reach. You carry. You walk.

You do all of these things without thinking.

Then pain enters the picture—and suddenly you think about every one of them.

Pain has a way of reducing life to its smallest components. It measures existence in steps, inches, minutes and movements. It can make the entire world seem no larger than a chair, a bed and the shortest available route to the bathroom.

But pain can also produce some very strange and unexpected results.

During those weeks, there was one activity that repeatedly carried me beyond the pain:

creative work.

When I sat at the computer and began to write, something changed.

The pain might not have disappeared physically—but it disappeared from the center of my attention. Ideas began arriving. Stories began forming. Subjects that I had stored away for months or even years suddenly demanded to be explored.

The body had slowed down, but the imagination had accelerated.

What initially seemed like an interruption in my creative life gradually became the subject of it.

The enforced rest caused by the injury gave me something I had not realized I needed: time to stop, time to think, and time to rediscover why creative work matters so much to me.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pain, frustration, medication, insomnia and uncertainty, the 700-pound pineapple was born.

Across five episodes, I will tell the story of this strange period in my life through some of the objects that became part of it: the pineapple, the duffel bag, the walker, the microphone, the pillow—and several other unlikely participants in the drama.

Some of these objects caused trouble.

Some offered relief.

Some became symbols of dependence.

And some helped open the door to an unexpected creative rebirth.

This will not be a medical lecture, although illness and recovery are part of the story.

It will not be an inspirational sermon insisting that every painful experience happens for a wonderful reason. When something hurts, it hurts—and there is nothing particularly poetic about trying to cross a room when every step is painful.

But neither is this a story of defeat.

Just because a great deal of this story deals with pain, does not mean that it is uncomfortable. I tried to have a great deal of humor in the story– Because there WAS a great deal of absurdity and downright laugh out loud humor surrounding the events.It is the story of a difficult and sometimes frightening experience that unexpectedly made room for imagination.

It is about vulnerability, dependence, frustration and hope.

It is about the peculiar relationship between the body and the creative mind.

And it is about discovering that, even when your physical world becomes smaller, your imaginative world can continue to expand.

Perhaps creativity does not always wait for ideal conditions.

Perhaps it enters when conditions are at their worst.

Perhaps it sits down beside us when we are tired, frightened or in pain—and quietly says:

“You may not be able to do everything today. But you can still make something.”

And sometimes, making something is how we begin to find our way forward.

So prepare yourself for a pineapple of almost unprecedented size.

A pineapple capable of rearranging an entire life.

A pineapple involving pain, absurdity, walkers, pillows, microphones, unexpected revelations—and more than a little humor.

Beginning in early September, please join me for all five episodes of:

The 700-Pound Pineapple: A Story of Pain, Imagination and Creative Renewal.

Right here on Celebrate Creativity.

I hope you’ll join me.

After all, it took five episodes—and a very sore back—to figure out what that pineapple had been trying to tell me.

That–Pain and creativity occupy two very different regions of human experience.

That - Pain contracts the world. Creativity expands it.

That -Pain directs our attention toward the body—toward the place that hurts, the movement we cannot make and the distance we cannot comfortably travel. Creativity directs our attention outward, toward possibilities that have not yet taken shape.

And yet, pain and creativity sometimes meet. 

I want to be careful about saying this. Pain is not inherently noble. It is not a blessing in disguise, and it does not automatically make anyone wiser, deeper or more creative. There is nothing romantic about being unable to walk across a room without wondering whether your back will cooperate. There is nothing poetic about losing sleep or becoming dependent upon other people for ordinary tasks.

Pain can exhaust creativity just as easily as it can inspire it.

But during my own experience, I discovered something unexpected. Although physical movement became difficult, the movement of my imagination remained unrestricted and even enhanced

I could not always go where I wanted to go physically—but through writing, I could go almost anywhere. 

When I became absorbed in the creation of a podcast, my attention shifted. The pain had not necessarily vanished, but it was no longer the only reality in the room. For a while, curiosity replaced anxiety. Language replaced limitation. The possibility of what I might create became more compelling than the list of things I could not do.

That is where pain and creativity intersect: not when suffering magically becomes beautiful, but when the imagination refuses to surrender the whole of life to suffering.

Creativity gave me an area in which I could still exercise choice. Pain might determine whether I could lift something, carry something or walk a certain distance—but it could not decide what I would think about. It could not prevent me from transforming an experience into a story.

It could not stop me from eliminating the 700-pound pineapple. And to understand what I mean by that, be sure and listen to the series.

In a very real sense, creativity became more than a pleasant distraction. It became a form of resistance.

Every page I wrote declared that I was more than a hurting body. Every idea reminded me that there were still unexplored rooms within my imagination. Every completed podcast episode became evidence that something meaningful could be produced during a period that otherwise seemed defined by limitation.

The injury forced me to stop, but stopping created silence. And within that silence, I began to hear ideas that the noise and momentum of ordinary life may have concealed.

I would never say that pain was necessary for creativity. Given the choice, I would gladly have produced these episodes without it. But since the pain had arrived, creativity allowed me to do something with the experience besides merely endure it.

I could observe it.

I could question it.

I could laugh at its absurdities.

And eventually, I could give it a title.

That may be one of creativity’s greatest powers. It cannot always remove what hurts, but it can prevent pain from having the final word. It takes an experience that threatens to diminish us and places it within a larger story.

Pain says, “Your world is becoming smaller.”

Creativity answers, “Then I will build another world within it.”

So join me for a series when walking across a room becomes a somewhat painful series of episodes called the 700 Pound Pineapple.   It's more fun than it might sound!

This has been George Bartley