Quiet breeds inspiration

The continued pursuit of less, of slow, of empty

Inside me, there is a tortoise and a hare.

I feel like all I am ever trying to do is slow down. Do less, I tell myself. I cut the daily lists in half, then in half again. Ease is something I have to choose, again and again.

Because while I’m trying to convince myself to go slower, the anxiety machine that is my subconscious is revving its engines, urging me to speed up, do more, do everything.

The hare is also impatient with how long it takes to undo a pattern, even the ones that keep it running.

Hurry up. Take your time. You’re so far behind. You’ll get there when you get there.

It won’t surprise you to know that writing is barely happening.

Fortunately, we’re one week into Write Start, a writing and creativity incubator that I’m facilitating alongside Talicha J. and Nikki Gray for the month of January. We ended Week 1 with our first community workshop. Nikki guided us through prompts, discussion, and readings to reconnect with the dreams and roots of our writing practices. And a theme that came up for many of us was how the pressure of productivity and hustling has disconnected us from our creativity, from the joy and pleasure of writing.

We need to slow down, we agreed. We need quiet, a break from the constant noise, outside and inside. As Nisha, one of our participants, put it:

“A lot comes to me in the quiet of rest. Quiet breeds inspiration and makes space for the thoughts that become words.”

I’ve been trying to wring a piece out of me for the past few weeks, frustrated that telling myself how to think and act doesn’t unlock a shortcut that lets me bypass actually having to do things differently.

Nisha’s words and the resounding messages coming to me all week reminded me of a piece I wrote for my Ghost newsletter last year. So I’m taking the tortoise’s advice and sharing that with you here. The other piece will come when it comes.

Empty Days

If you hang around me long enough, you'll find me repeating myself. This might be a holdover from teaching high school and echoing the same catchphrases over and over to help my students build routines (teachers, you know that sweet victory of having your mannerisms and sayings mimicked).

Things I repeat about writing:

• All the rules are made up.

• There's no way to win at this.

• You're a writer even when you're not writing.

The other day, my friend Jess (who has been my friend since our days sharing posts on nascent LiveJournal) sent me a snippet of May Sarton's diary about the importance of empty days. Sarton wrote:

"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever."

I love it, perhaps most of all because Sarton doesn't talk about the importance of getting away from the work and out into the world. She doesn't advise us to have an adventure or take on a chore or be productive in some other way. Instead, what's important, she says, is to produce nothing.

May Sarton in 1983

Not a few lines of journaling. Not a clean house. Not a new hobby.

To not try to be or do anything whatever.

How often do you allow yourself an empty day?

As someone trying to break the tendency to work all day, every day, I'm drawn to the idea of requiring empty days for myself. And intrigued by what counts as "empty" — a day in which I don't write or work, but do spend hours in the kitchen tackling a time-consuming, labor-intensive recipe that I've been saving is its own kind of appealing, but not empty.

What do I need to do in order to feel good without worrying about feeling productive (which is to say, "of use")?

New life goal: Be the changing light of a room.

How do empty days seem to you? What would your empty days be empty of? What would you fill them with?

Slowing down sounds easy, but I can’t become a tortoise overnight. I have muscles to retrain, a new heartbeat to adjust to. Like anything, it’s a practice. Slow and steady.