I sat down to write. No words. (I am rarely a woman with no words, especially when confronted by a fresh document.)
So I went to things I’d started before to see if I could work on one of those. Nope.
List of ideas? No good ones.
And then I had a couple of conversations that I’d been nervous about for unpleasant but not terrible reasons, the kind that don’t push themselves to the front of your mind constantly but they’re running in the background.
The conversations went fine. And then I was able to write.
Funny that.
Larger scale, between writing and podcasting and tons of behind-the-scenes tech stuff, combined with school at home in May and this month, along with the usual keeping-the-household-running duties, I’ve felt swamped a lot of the time.
The moment I was ahead on some of the work, ideas for other things began to flow. I have an idea for a new book project. I volunteered to run a zoom on fear (that turned into a larger-scale project then was scaled back down to a zoom). I’m thinking about photography in more detail. I’m wondering how to use the watercolor pencils I was gifted.
That “coming up for air” moment fuels the creativity tornado in my brain. Being in better shape than “coming up for air” yields more results (including time to actually dive into the projects that the tornado spit out) but just this little crack of space brought up so much.
It reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about flowers and other plants that grow in unlikely places, the ones you see coming up through pavement or rocks. It takes so very little for them to take root and grow and bloom.
Same for creativity. Just needs a little bit of space. Not a whole studio or four hours blocked out on the calendar.
How can you feed yours? Not necessarily to share with anyone or to feed your family with—to feed yourself.