Stephanie Anderson

At the moment I am preparing for a series of creativity workshops in Eastbourne, starting this October, and it has set me thinking about my personal creative process.  It’s a personal process because of course different things work for each of us.

An important element of my own process is walking.  I love walking because it allows me to exercise and think at the same time.  When I’m in the middle of an intensive period of writing, and sometimes when my head is so full of things I can’t think clearly, I head out the front door for a walk – it’s something I’ve always done without really thinking about it.  Now I realise that it’s one of those activities that occupies enough of my mind to function (and not fall over) but not so much that there’s no thinking room.  Gardening can be the same, although without the repetitive thud thud of my feet striking the pavement it’s not quite so good.  The walking rhythm is important and provides a kind of backdrop to the mental activity of making connections and new discoveries, seeing things anew, constructing novel images.  It puts me in another place in my head, another part and a different use – set apart almost from normal conscious thought.  In that place – the same place incidentally I access when I’m fully in the flow of writing – I can think creatively.

Last time I wrote about tackling  a long-haul flight from Australia by switching into a ‘zone of acceptance’ – a space in my head where I could make the most of the trip (as a thinking time) rather than struggle against the inevitable tiredness and discomfort of the twenty-three hour flight.  This ‘state of acceptance’ is I believe a skill, an art, that we can learn and get better at with practice.

Sometimes we can make changes in our life to bring it closer to how we’d like it to be.  Or we can change our perspective, shifting our focus to the aspects we are happy with and away from the ones we are not –   making a situation we don’t like easier to live with.  But there are times we may find ourselves fighting against a situation we can’t change, for the time being at least, and living with the stress and exhaustion from wishing and willing it to be different.

Some of the people I’ve coached have wanted to make career changes and my role has been to help them work out their new direction and a possible route for making the change.  In one or two instances they can’t make an immediate switch to their new career – often because their commitments are dependent on their current salary.  Rather than feel miserable and trapped they have to learn  to live more comfortably with their present situation while they take the necessary steps for the longer-term change. They have to accept things as they are – for now.

A friend of mine has a simple phrase for situations she doesn’t like but is learning to accept – she says “when it just is”.  When I repeated her phrase to myself later, while locked in the middle of a ‘worry circle’ of my own making, I found myself sighing and letting go of tension as I did.  It’s a short phrase packed with meaning.  So now when I come across a situation I’m struggling to accept I call it a ‘just is’ moment.  It doesn’t mean that I resign myself to something realistically I could change, nor does it deny the strength of feeling I might  have have about it, but it does put me in a place where I can accept it as it is and for what it is, with the peace of mind that comes with it.

I arrived home from Australia a few days ago, returning from the adventure I’d set off on a month before.  For decades now it’s been relatively easy to jump on  a plane to almost any part of the globe, but even now a long-haul flight can feel more a feat of endurance than the romantic notion of travel I harbour.

The twenty three hours of the outward journey had been relatively easy and with an empty seat next to me I was able to sleep for about three hours.  When it came to returning I didn’t fare as well and after a long time away from home and family I found myself willing the journey to be at an end.  But then I reminded myself that this time of waiting was as much a part of the adventure as the experiences I’d had in Australia, and that without one I couldn’t have had the other.  This switched me into a zone of acceptance that saw me through to landing.

Not only did this acceptance make the trip more tolerable but it also made it possible to see the hours as a luxury of ‘empty time’ to spend looking back at the weeks away and forward to the homecoming.   I recognised that as on all recent trips I was lucky to be returning home to the life I have; to people I love and to the writing and coaching work I enjoy so much.   Lucky too that I can look forward to other adventures to come.