A Surgical Vacation
where Radical Creativity crashes the productivity party
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A Surgical Vacation
where Radical Creativity crashes the productivity party
As I return to writing from my surgical hiatus, I want to thank each and every one of you for sticking with me through this quiet, post-less, five weeks.
Writing on Substack works for me because you are here. It works for me because your support inspires me to reach higher, breathe easier. I embrace the countless hours it takes to pull this material together knowing I have you on the other side. And for this, I am always grateful.
After the hip surgery (the result of a fall a decade ago), I was astonished at how physical healing upends everything. There wasn’t even space to worry about missing so many posts in a row (the ultimate no-no in our roller-coaster world of productivity, productivity, productivity).
First, you sleep. Not the normal nightly stretch. No, post-surgical sleep is twilight zone sleep in a graveyard of consciousness. Two, maybe 3 hours, then a haunting, San Francisco fog rolls you off the couch for medications, shuffling bathroom runs, hydration, then another two or three hours… all night, most of the day.
And this wears on and on for two hundred years.
Then, there’s this prolonged mental intermission, as if someone hijacked your brain back stage. Thinking persists in present tense and defiantly literal. What time is? Have I taken x, y, or z? Am I thirsty? How much post-surgical exercise can I handle right now? Hungry? Need to pee? All the rooms of your mind sterilized, not even a lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
Your physical body holds center stage… At. All. Times. A reluctant odyssey when you’re used to commanding your body to do your bidding. Now your body commands you to do its!
The spiritual self hunkers down on autopilot. Divinity operating (on so many levels!!) without conscious attention, as if the surgical anesthesia has migrated onto other shores of reality.
Then Week Five changes everything…
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Surrendering the Stranglehold of Productivity…
At the physical level, all time is bone time. Under normal conditions, healing bone takes six weeks. The same time it takes a simple fracture in a cast to heal.
With the body in command, and hyper-focused on building bone, my brain was re-routed to anything and everything my body requested. By week four, I gave up thinking this would change.
Life had packed productivity in moth balls and stored it in the attic of my despair. I became deeply, sadly convinced this was my new reality. Then, without warning, in the middle of week five, a whole new me woke up.
Without any preamble or warming-up, I bolted into my studio, and in five hours knocked off a book outline with research parameters, a list of 16 potential contacts related to the eight outlined chapters for a book in the visual arts that had been incubating in my subconscious for years.
A book I’d long ago given up on.
A book I wasn’t even thinking about.
A book no one else has thought to write (yup… that could be a red flag, except it reminds me of that other book no one else thought to write: artist statements.)
Turns out that turning off productivity, sleeping like a bear in winter, distracting what was left of my mind with healing/survival only, this five-week rest blew open a wild ride on the Creativity Super Highway. And, yes, I returned to sleeping most of the next day. Bone may be healed, but the body is still taking its own sweet time to give me more than a few hours in a row.
This event reminded me about another time, in 2011, when a productivity aha also took me by storm. I was burned out from running the annual smARTist Telesummit, for five straight years, so I took an unheard of three-weeks off.
I left for a retreat, hugging all my professional accomplishments in a tattered backpack, and I returned sans backpack and with so much energy and creativity I didn’t recognize myself.
This time, however, my enforced, healing-vacation realization went further. I experienced, in slow motion over five weeks, how deeply our cultural, productivity mantra has hacked into our psyches. How this relentless mandate chains us to an outdated merry-go-round with a shiny, golden ring hovering out of reach.
Our cultural, hyper-focus on productivity as the holy grail (time management, project management, self-management, the best, i.e., quickest, way to do x, y, or z, and so on…), kicks us into endlessly producing without a sustained rest, never realizing that we are producing the equivalent of tasteless, stale bread.
Without stretches of sustained rest, we deny our aliveness the chance to be alive.
We deny our creativity the chance to be radical.
We deny our minds the full range of their potential brilliance.
The Surprise of a Radical Creativity Renaissance
Anecdotes and folklore have long given us the truism that creativity/inspiration often shows up after 1) a prolonged period of focus on a question or idea, and then 2) we release the original focus/idea and turn in a different direction.
One study—the Default Mode Network Studies by Raichle et al.—discovered a network in our brains that turns on once we stop focusing on an external task: the DMN.
Suddenly, this DMN begins to support self-reflection, memory, and creative insight.
Whadda you know…
True, this study zeroed in on short-term, active tasks followed by another short-term “resting-state”, quite different from my physically dominant, five-week healing-rest, followed by a sustained burst of creative activity.
And yet, I would argue that any resting-state gives you a radical, creative advantage over the cultural mantra to produce, produce, produce.
One More Reason To Embrace Radical Creativity
Ordinary creativity waits for the active focus/resting-state process to appear on its own. Yay when it does. A nothing-burger when it doesn’t
Radical Creativity intentionally, deliberately, and with full conscious awareness, adopts the process… in advance!
Instead of waiting for an organic process to stimulate a creative insight, Radical Creativity takes active participation in the process: plans for it, uses it, and reuses it.
Radical Creativity assumes that you always have agency over your creative projects: their inspiration, motivation, and culmination.
And, Yes, There Is A Catch
How do we convince our ultra-conditioned, cultural self that not producing is, in truth, one of the best ways to produce—with greater effectiveness and satisfaction that results in more success?
Which swings us around to one of the core attributes of adult creativity, which you developed in your priceless teen years: the Janusian effect, or paradox awareness.
When is productivity most effective?
When you stop producing.
What’s Next?
Creativity is 100% dependent on how well our body, mind, and spirits are experiencing being alive.
If you travel back, maybe you can re-experience a bit of the aliveness that enveloped you as a teenager—whether you were high with excitement or low with angst. Life felt larger, from more euphoric to more oppressive, no matter where you were on the spectrum of beingness.
What greater gift could you ask for?
Your support inspires me to reach higher, breathe easier. Your free subscription is splendid. A Paid Subscription helps support my independent writing so I have the resources to offer you more!
Meanwhile, please …
1. Add a comment to this post because hearing from you makes my day! Your thoughts and questions can spark a conversation. Controversy welcomed!
2. Tap the heart icon if you’re resonating with any of this, or just because I’d like to know you’re out there, on the other side.
3. Really? Inspiration changed from a what to a Who? Come Meet The Goddess of Inspiration and expand your creative options: an original, guided meditation for any time you hit a creative speed bump or doubts are stealing the show.
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Hello Ariane! I'm so delighted to hear that your much, much needed (perhaps demanded works better here) rest propelled you into a creative highway of sorts. I find this all so fascinating, and absolutely resonant. I know that when I am dead-ended in my writing, I best not trudge on. Instead, I close the lid on my laptop and do just about anything else, and just wait until something, inevitably, rises to the surface later on. My best revelations happen this way. I love knowing that this is A THING! Such great writing, here, friend. You're so darn brilliant.