I am in a particularly dynamic season of my life, with new partnerships taking shape, meetings filling the calendar, workshops being developed, and enough planning underway that there is almost always something useful I could be doing.
Which is why, when I found myself alone for a few hours this weekend, with the rare choice between doing absolutely nothing and getting ahead on a few work deadlines – I decided to strip the paint off our doors.
This was not on any list.
It was not urgent, particularly strategic – or even something I had been meaning to get done that weekend. I simply started peeling away a bit of old paint, became curious about what was underneath, and kept going.
Then I moved to a window, just to see.
At some point, apparently having decided that two unnecessary unfinished projects were insufficient, I also thought this would be an excellent time to repaint the bathroom.
It did not take long before the pleasure of beginning began to morph into a not so pleasurable frustration with myself. I had a deadline getting closer, several significant pieces of work already in motion, and now three more loose ends sitting quite literally around my house.
None of them needed to be done.
There is a particular irritation that comes from knowing you have created your own problem, and I felt it every time I walked past the half stripped front door.
But somewhere between scraping, sanding, and painting, something else started happening.
Ideas that I had been working hard to organize began arriving without much effort at all. A workshop I had been developing started taking a clearer shape. Pieces that had felt separate suddenly belonged together. Language came. Questions came. Next steps became obvious.
I brought my laptop into the middle of it and started moving back and forth between the two kinds of work. Scrape for a while, stop to write something down, paint another section, open the computer again.
This was probably not excellent computer care – in fact,I am reasonably certain the construction dust now lodged under my command key is a direct result of this arrangement – but the thinking it provoked was unusually good.
Psychologists studying what is called creative incubation have found that stepping away from a problem does not necessarily mean we stop working on it. In one study, people who moved from a creative problem into a simple, undemanding activity generated more creative responses than those who tackled something cognitively demanding, fully rested, or continued working on the problem. Why the improvement? Greater mind wandering during the intervening task.
Other research has found something equally interesting among professional writers and physicists: that roughly one fifth of the important ideas they recorded arrived not while they were working on the problem in front of them, but when their minds were wandering.
The famed music producer Rick Rubin writes and speaks about creativity from a very different vantage point, but he posits a similar connection between focus and disengagement. In his view, creative work requires attention, but it also requires periods in which we stop insisting that the answer arrive because we have scheduled an hour to find it.
I had been in meetings, writing notes, building plans, making decisions, and asking my brain to actively solve things for days. Apparently, adding another few hours of concentrated thought was not what it needed from me.
It needed a scraper.
There is a kind of work that asks us to concentrate and another that seems to give concentration somewhere to go. Repetitive physical tasks occupy enough of us to interrupt the effort of trying to solve something, while leaving enough room for connections to continue forming underneath.
Perhaps that is why certain ideas arrive in the shower, on a walk, while gardening, driving a familiar route or doing something with our hands. We have not necessarily stopped working on the problem. We have simply stopped standing over it demanding an answer.
What interests me is how quickly I had judged what I was doing as a waste of time because it was not the work I had decided I should be doing. And yet –
I am writing this with a freshly painted bathroom,, which I am choosing to count as a fairly significant weekend victory.
I also have an unfinished window and an unfinished front door, but they sit alongside a workshop that finally makes sense; several ideas I feel eager to pursue; and a much clearer sense of what needs to happen next.
The loose ends are still there, taking just enough of my attention for the more important threads to come together.
