Leonard Wolf, my father, believes that the heart’s creative wisdom has a more important message than anything else, and that our task in life is to realise that message. A teacher for almost 60 years, he believes that no amount of money or recognition can compensate you if you are not doing your life’s passionate creative work; and if you are not doing it you had better draw everything to a complete stop until you can listen deeply to your soul, identify your true heart’s desire and change direction. It’s that urgent.

He feels that your medium may be words or music or paint; it could also be the guiding of an organisation, the baking of a certain kind of cake, the edging of a garden, the envisioning of a new kind of computer network, or the gesture that brushes the hair away from the forehead of a hurt child. What matters to my father is not whether the creative work is valued in the marketplace; what matters to him is whether or not it is yours.

I believe my father’s insistence on creative freedom may be the secret to happiness. He believes that the creative act is the secret of joy and, in spite of his occasional fits of pro forma testiness, he is the happiest man I have ever known.

To gather his central ideas about writing and about life, I asked him to teach me what he had taught his students in a famous class on poetry and writing. I learnt the titles of the 12 lessons with a tremendous sense of recognition, though I had never heard them before; they were the background music of my childhood.

One: Be Still And Listen. “The very first lesson to a young poet, or anyone starting in on creative work, is this: go somewhere quiet and listen inwardly. What you hear internally might completely surprise you; and it won’t be true unless you hear it first internally.”

Two: Use Your Imagination. “In lesson two,” he said, “I ask my students to notice ‘the secondary imagination’. I have them look closely first at, say, a tree, and then ask themselves: what, besides what they are looking at, might they be looking at? A tree is a tree, but it is also a life cycle.

“Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang . . .’ A tree is old age, is approaching death.

“Or, say, look at a button: a button is a button, you would think. But when holding the dead Cordelia in his arms, Lear says, ‘Pray you, undo this button,’ and the button is a symbol of his hope that in the face of all evidence, Cordelia is still alive. The imagination can see the anguish of a daughter’s death in a button, just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand.”

Three: Destroy The Box. “Boxes in life are clichés about how people should behave: your father was a lawyer, you have to go to law school. Whenever I am asked to fit into someone else’s rigid structure, I get uncomfortable,” Leonard explained. “And I have always hoped that my students would learn to be equally uncomfortable. People are more alive when they stop thinking in terms of boxes.”

Four: Speak In Your Own Voice. “It’s your story. No one else can construct your narrative for you. I tell my students they can choose any format they want — fairy tale, fable, memoir, dialogue — but it has to be authentic. I don’t want a polished imitation of some fashionable writer or trendy genre. I would rather have something raw but genuine.”

I understood what he meant. Many of my own students — I am involved with a leadership organisation called the Woodhull Institute — are trained to see what they have to say in terms of marketable categories. As a result they tend to be intimidated into using corporate-speak, PC-speak, nonprofit-speak, screenplay-speak, literary-speak. The notion of one’s own unique voice and vision — as understood outside the context of the marketplace — is as arcane an idea to them, and as dangerous to trust, as the notion that you can base your future on weaving, or cooking artisanal food, or growing heirloom wildflowers.

Five: Identify Your Heart’s Desire. My dad believes that in order to be a fully realised person you need to have your heart’s desire. He believes, too, that your heart’s desire often appears to you first as a symbol. Those symbols can reveal you to yourself at least as clearly as a psychologist can. Do you keep tuning your radio to cowboy music? Pay attention. Is there something you need to be free of? Do you keep lingering over herbs in a grocery store? Pay attention. Has something in your life lost its savour?

“In all your relationships, every day, a literal exchange is taking place, but so is a symbolic one,” he said. “This is why so many people are confused about their heart’s desire. They are paying attention to literal meaning — say, the size of their pay cheque — but ignoring the symbols that are crowding around them: say, the fact that they keep gazing out of the window at birds migrating.