Avoiding A (Creative) Mental Freeze

This week, we got nearly 2 feet of snow in NYC. While it was fun, it certainly threw off the week's schedule and planning a bit. Nothing I'm not used to. I grew up near Chicago where, in winters, we would regularly spend days, sometimes weeks below freezing. Wearing 4 or 5 layers became fairly commonplace.

One other thing that we used to do was let all of our sinks drip constantly. Running water, even just a slow and steady drip prevents the water in the pipes from stagnating and likely freezing. That can cause the pipes to burst and is a big and expensive headache.

Because it's the literal middle of winter right now, our pipes are at risk of freezing up. But it's also the middle of the metaphorical winter. A long period of hibernation and stagnancy. So we may want to think about the running faucet as an appropriate metaphor for the creative process during a pandemic. It's a pretty challenging time to find ourselves struck by inspiration or feel motivated to sit down and be creative and do our best work. There's not a lot of high-pressure flow coming out of our brain right now. But that doesn’t mean we can't keep our faucet dripping a little bit.

We can use this time to practice our craft just a little bit at a time.
If you’re already feeling frozen, schedule five minutes in your calendar every day next week and dedicate that time to make something. Write. Draw. Compose. Throw. Play. At the very least, at the end of the week, you’ll have five days worth of creation. And that might be just enough to wiggle our way out of feeling stuck.

We don't have to publish or share or publicly show what we're working on.
Just making sure that by the time we're ready to share, we're not out of practice.

Every day. Once a week. 2 minutes a day. Whenever it is, run the mental tap and don't let the flow freeze.

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Jake Kahana is a cofounder of Caveday. Sign up for his personal emails, called “The Email Refrigerator” here.