My intention was to get up this morning and write.
In fact, I started writing, then went looking for a link related to the post I was working on, which led to a search through email, which brought up another email which had to be dealt with, which led to a lost password ‘situation’ and on it went.
At the desk for almost three hours, yet feeling like I’d just been bouncing around from nagging problem to nagging problem. All tasks that needed attention at some point, but none of which led to putting cohesive thoughts together in the last few hours.
“It’s going to be one of those days,” I thought as I stood up. “Or is it? None of this is insurmountable. None of it is impossible. It’s just annoying. A gaggle of petty, distracting, time-consuming annoyances. Life could certainly be worse.”
“It’s not as though I’d been buried in an avalanche,” I continued thinking to myself as I cracked an egg for a much-delayed breakfast. “It’s more like gravel on the ice.”
“Gravel on the ice?”
Where did that come from? What does that mean?
Traction and friction are two sides of the same phenomena.
In creative work, we hope to attain the first and avoid the second.
If an entire city is iced over (as Portland was recently) then gravel is essential for going anywhere. It’s messy, and the streets look terrible after everything has melted, yet it provides enough traction to walk around.
But that wasn’t the image I had when that phrase popped into my mind.
I was picturing myself on ice skates, trying to move elegantly across the ice. Instead of gliding gently over a smooth and finished surface, I imagined myself overly preoccupied with each movement, my eyes fixed a few feet in front of me, never able to look away for fear that with my next step, I would hit a pebble that would twist my ankle and send me spinning.
These weren’t boulders in my way. I could move around them. But having to pay such close attention meant that I could never gain any speed or momentum.
Just as we must choose our footwear and the type of movements we make based on surface conditions, we also need to choose our creative tools and gestures based on our own current conditions – energetic, emotional, and environmental.
When impeded by pebbles and grit, take off your skates and lace up your boots. And if you find your self slipping or sliding all over the place, you can either throw down some gravel to give yourself something to grip, or pull on your skates, embolden your gestures and see where the ice takes you.
This is based on a draft from this past winter that never made it onto the blog. I decided to revive and publish it before ice and snow seemed too distant in the minds of Northern hemisphere readers. For those of you in the South, consider it a preview.
