Lack of Inspiration.

Dreadful words for any artist or writer.

It’s the irritating feeling that we should be doing something with our creative juices, yet nothing formulates or transpires.

It makes us feel lazy, useless and stuck.

The seemingly endless cycle of stagnation and procrastination swirls our thoughts and actions into half-hearted attempts: reluctantly sitting down to write, sluggishly moving onto our yoga mats, haphazardly picking up the paint brush etc., only to realize again and again that our heart and emotions just aren’t interested in the act.

This time period can be short, a simple funk we are in, or it can be very long. The Short Run of stagnation is relatively simple to get out of from a small stimulus.

It’s a break we need to take, but its intensity is perhaps not as extreme as the Long Haul of procrastination we are all familiar with.

When we are stuck in the latter, it usually implies an overdue, much needed pause our mind and body is literally forcing us to take because we are grossly over-saturated.

In the long haul, instead of “action” we require “absorption.”

We are taking vital rest and saving up the juices that seem non-existent, even though it feels like a perpetual state of stagnation we can’t get rid of.  A small stimulus isn’t enough when we are here because we are re-formulating on the inside.

We have to absorb ourselves first, before we reach our tipping point.

Whether it’s stimuli, exhaustion or exasperation; one week, two months or 200 days, we eventually wheel ourselves out of it. When we get to our tipping points, we start to experiment with writing endless drafts sitting in various settings, playing with different colors on the canvas for days, dancing like a crazy person until the rhythm hits us and watching numerous yoga videos.

Something will crack us open again.

When you’ve been through a multitude of stagnation and absorption cycles, you’ll naturally know how to handle it. It’s an ebb and flow and part of the endless process of “rebooting” we all have to do at critical junctions of our lives.

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

 

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Editor: Brianna Bemel

 

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