Let’s Just Pretend The Last 8 Months Never Happened

Looks like it was a sabbatical after all.

Last March, after close to a three-year tenure, I hung up my Storytellers U hat — the one with the Viking horns and a beer funnel — without knowing whether this would be permanent or temporary. Couldn’t help but notice, in the interim, that lords-of-the-manor Dave and Joe never filled that vacated slot for the ninth of each month, or even dropped my name from the active roster, maybe under the belief that, since nature abhors a vacuum, I would eventually slam back into place like an airline passenger into a fuselage crack at 30,000 feet.

Apparently this strategy of inaction worked. That thudding sound you hear…

And hang onto that word, inaction, if you will. It’s key today.

In the grand scheme, this monthly slot is not an especially demanding gig, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immune to something resembling burnout. By last March I was feeling bereft of ideas to bring to the table here. Worse, maybe, I was feeling bereft of much desire to bring them.

And so it felt right to go for a long, meandering walk.

I’ve come to recognize in myself a restlessness that sometimes push-pulls me out one door and toward another, usually a less familiar one. At the same time, there’s a gravitational tug that sometimes pulls my orbit back around to those old, familiar rooms.

Except I come back not quite the same writer, not quite the same person. This is nearly always for the better. Because I’ve been rewired.

Hang onto that word rewired, too.

Nobody ever promised us that life in the creative lane would be a smooth ride. Oh, it has its moments of gliding across the glass-still sea. Days when the words bear you effortlessly up like thermal drafts beneath a falcon’s wings. But then there are the days, the many many days, when it’s all whirlpools, typhoons, and clipped feathers.

And there aren’t just days like that. There are novels like that. Stories like that. Screenplays and essays and poems like that.

There are times when, whatever your project may be, the two of you are just not right for each other.

Sometimes, in the face of a monumental creative incompatibility, be it a blocking wall or a yawning sinkhole, the best course of action really is none at all. Walking the other way. Heading the opposite direction, with an eye toward finding your way back again by some other route whose signposts you won’t know until you see them.

It’s more than just giving yourself time for a few fresh breezes to blow the musty funk and cobwebs from your head. You can accomplish that much in one indulgent afternoon off, and as the beneficiary of many such afternoons I’ll gladly admit they can work small miracles. Sometimes that’s all the honey-laced medicine you need.

But sometimes the challenge runs deeper. Think, in terms of degree, of the difference between a mood and a personality disorder.

Walking the other way — we don’t much like that here in the global West. It’s not the way we were taught. So there’s something shameful about it. While detouring down a path of lesser resistance has always struck me as being a perfectly acceptable strategy in the East, in the West we’re the amped-up spawn of different doctrinal DNA, in particular the hard-assed Calvinist work ethic which holds that if a thing is worth doing, then it’s worth doing with such grim, unrelenting insistence to bend it to your will that you make yourself miserable long before you’re finished and lose sight of why you ever wanted to do it in the first place.

Which is probably a great success formula for cutting down acres of trees or making little rocks out of big ones; but for creative work, personally I’ve always found that approach counterproductive for getting over anything more than a minor hump. Maybe because it doesn’t allow much room for reflection.

But here’s the thing about walking the other way. It really isn’t a path of inaction at all, or shouldn’t be. Not when there are so many other things, new things, to try. A different novel, story, screenplay, essay, poem. A different creative outlet altogether. Or something that may not even be traditionally regarded as “creative” at all.

Do it. Do it with heart, do it with dedication, do it with more commitment than you’d give some simple fleeting diversion, and it will leave its mark on you. Do it, and it will leave you rewired.

This is due to something I’ve found increasingly fascinating lately: neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its neurons and their networks in response to new experiences. It’s not a new concept — it was initially theorized in the late 19^th century, but had to overcome half a century of being ignored before it made much headway, and even then seemed to take a few more decades to filter into general understanding. Pretty much every biology class I ever had likened the brain to a blob of Jello that reached its developmental apex a few years after it jiggled free of the mold, then spent the next several decades declining into rotting Swiss cheese.

Yeah, and physicians used to bleed out evil humors, too.

Instead, my favorite metaphor for neurons so far is a passage comparing each one to a waving forest whose branches are constantly breaking old connections and making new ones.

Now, what does that have to do with walking away from a challenge and coming back to it later? Only everything. Because if you’re lucky — or intuitively prone to seeking out what you need — then just maybe this tweaked version of you is the one better equipped to meet the challenge you walked away from.

New paths of thought, expanded ways of seeing, deepened understandings … these are a writer’s bags of gold to foot the bill for that next trip into terra incognita.

Or at least bags of fertilizer to grow what you plant once you’re there.

Here are a few things I did since last March, things I’d never done before.

1. Received a torn biceps tendon during Krav Maga training.
2. Researched and self-rehabbed a torn biceps tendon.
3. Planned, planted, and tended a vegetable garden.
4. Discovered a love for refinishing furniture.
5. Took up soldering so I can make my own audio cables.
6. Learned and practiced a few rudiments of parkour.

I’m trying to stick to things that have a physical element of doing about them, where mind and body are both involved, and where they denote some kind of ongoing activity. Then there’s the life of pure mind: the books read, the words written, the subjects explored.

You have your own list. Do tell, please.

How will mine impact my work? In most cases, I can’t concretely say. Not yet. Although there’s one, which I’ll get into next month, because for now this is running long.

But I feel different, changed by them all, and as a starting point — or restarting point — it’s all good.