Sylvia's Journal

I feel like I have been lifted up into a creative cloud and I am happier than I have been in a long time. It has indeed been a long time. For the last few years I have not been very creative (knitting and embroidery doesn’t count as it is done from a pattern someone else created). My poetry had dried up (no new entries for a long long time), and I found myself reacting perversely to all the exhortations to ‘think out of the box,’ by crawling deeper into it.

My facilitation of a virtual course, my work on proposals, my writing of an e-learning course are combining to have a cumulative effect that has propelled me into the kind of creative thinking and exploration I had forgotten how to do. This is the funny thing about creativity (or innovation for that matter): it cannot be harnessed, it cannot be summoned.

Now, with what looks like enough work to fill my eight hours a day, I am released from that anxiety. And without travel on the horizon (not until after the Fourth of July) I am able to plash around in possibilities and ideas, and it changes everything.

It may not only be the work conditions that are responsible for this change. I have started to make a habit of doing a 15 minute silent meditation early in the morning and it is starting to have its effect – 15 minutes now passes by very quickly where at first it seemed like an hour. I can actually silence the verbal chatter. The visual chatter is still there but I can even shut that out for a few minutes at a time. I can slow my breath (and heartbeat to follow in tandem) and when I am done I feel like I can take on any challenge in the world with a calm intentionality.