Standing Aside for the Inflow
It’s been two years since my mid-pandemic cross-country move in April 2020 and I feel as though I’m still remaking my life—still trying to map out a wildly reconfigured reality and asking myself how to work/write/love/live in this new reality. One text I’ve been turning to for both pragmatic advice and creative encouragement during this process is Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own (you may be able to find a less expensive used copy under her pen name Joanna Field; another book, On Not Being Able to Paint, is also a creative gold mine). It’s a strange little book (first published in 1934 so it feels dated in some passages and prescient in others) full of doodles and diary entries and big questions about how we determine our own inner wants in a world full of external pressures.
She writes wisely and beautifully about the complex interrelationship of writing, thinking, and consciousness. But it’s this sentence about the relationship between creative thinking and the nervous system [my modern language] that I keep returning to:
“I began to suspect that there might be rhythm of thinking just as there is a rhythm of the heart-beat, and I had perhaps been concerning myself with one phase only, trying to make the strong push forward last all the time, never recognizing the need to stand aside for the inflow.”
Here is negative capability in the language of the heartbeat. It reminds me of the connection between inspiration and breath; it opens the possibility of not gasping/grasping after inspiration, but rather letting the next inbreath, the next word or idea, follow the pause that follows the outbreath. I’m not a social scientist or economist, but I suspect that The Great Resignation is partly based on a collective desire to escape 24-hour productivity and get back to rhythms of living and thinking that allow us to ‘stand aside for the inflow’.
On a personal level, I have been shedding some of the workaholic habits I adopted while completing my PhD (definitely a ‘strong forward push’) and finding that, when I ‘stand aside’ regularly, I have more energy to give my coaching clients’ writing AND more moments of insight and inspiration for my own poetry.
Here’s what ‘standing aside for the inflow’ has looked like for me recently:
-setting aside no email/no internet Saturdays (and even whole weekends)
-sitting down with my commonplace book and letting myself doodle rather than write
-sitting with new interests and letting them whisper and rustle at me before I dive into research mode and order 10 books from the library (this one has been a struggle)
-sitting outside and doing nothing
-occasionally putting off tasks (like submitting to journals or updating my website) that make me look productive to the outside world in favor of less visible work on writing projects that feel urgent to me
-embracing the pockets of boredom in my day instead of rushing to fill them with small tasks and furious (often futile) attempts to think my way through problems
Boredom, I have been realizing, isn’t the death of creativity—sometimes it’s the origin of creativity.
