The underrated part of creativity

"Be blank" and everything will follow.

Chris Abatsis. Reconnect project. Death to Stock.

Hundreds of new emails in my personal Gmail. Bolded unreads in my work email, every one needing a reply within a day or two. Unanswered texts. New WhatsApp messages landed overnight from friends abroad. Instagram messages and things I “need to react to” (lmao emoji). Notes scattered across four different apps. Digital detritus floating around my Google Drive. Do I even need half this stuff? A Google Calendar of color-coded blocks accounting for almost every minute of the day. 764 reminders of tasks — one-offs, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. Custom ones: Every third Wednesday of the month. Recurring every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

Don’t get me wrong, these are helpful tools. But in late 2018, they were helping me feel helpless. My life was optimized for doing “the most”, yet so little of it felt fulfilling.

The technological tension and tallying of tasks had reached a boiling point. I needed to get out.

Doing nothing as an extreme sport

One of the most consequential mouse-clicks of my life was when I paid the fees and registered for a 15-day silent meditation retreat in Crestone, Colorado. 

Moderation? What about that Buddhist “middle way,” you ask? Please. I was doing way too much, so obviously I continued in that vein — signed up for way too much nothing.

Patrick Chin. Wild Imagination project. Death to Stock.

Crestone is a town of scarcely one hundred people at the foot of the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Range, in the northern part of the San Luis Valley. On a clear blue winter day, blinding white snow blankets the top half of sumptuous black mountains. The scene is physically and visually breathtaking to behold.

There, my fellow retreatants and I were aggressively seeking inner peace. After six days of only meditating, eating, sleeping and not speaking, my brain really started to cook. First, I fell completely out of touch with linear time. Sixty seconds could feel like months, sixty minutes a mopped-up moment.

Second, my senses heightened from the low-stimulus environment. When the cooks were preparing breakfast, I could smell unseasoned oatmeal wafting up two flights of stairs in 3-D. Feet shuffling during walking meditation stopped being a distinct sound, but rather rose and fell back into the velvet-like silence.

I had become an unexciting X-Men character, or simply closer to the animal we all are. Once I stopped doing so much, my brain could work differently.

The 3 phases of the creative process

Eventually, we were treated to a dharma talk (short lecture on Buddhist teaching). Sounds forming words shaped into ideas left the mouth of a kindly teacher seated at the flat, wide dais. After days of hearing mostly loud silence, this was hypnotic and disorienting.

“Is this what people long-lost at sea feel, when they glimpse land?” I dazedly asked myself.

He spoke about the three kayas, or three different levels of reality according to Buddhism:

• dharmakaya - the void, nothingness, emptiness, space, silence, essence

• sambhogakaya - inspiration, dreams, vision, imagination

• nirmanakaya - forms, objects, speech, actions taken

This idea slipped into my ear, worked its way upwards, and collided with a set of neural pathways I’d built up over time about “creativity”. 

I saw the three kayas map onto the Western bare-bones creative process:

• Blank canvas, also known as

  • play

  • preparation

  • space

  • silence

  • white page/space

  • free time

  • meditation

  • contemplation

  • gestation

  • incubation

• Inspiration, also known as

  • insight

  • illumination

  • evaluation

  • ideas

  • spark

  • dreams

  • vision

  • imagination

  • plan

  • sketches

  • drafts

• Products, also known as

  • produce

  • creation

  • elaboration

  • verification

  • invention

  • construction

  • making actual stuff in the world: books, articles, music, paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, designs, architecture, speeches, digital products, podcasts, etc. 

Phase 1 is like paying taxes

Our society is hyper-focused on Phase 3, products — the outcome of creativity. “Pay attention to this thing we made” could be the subtitle of all marketing.

Coming in second: Phase 2, inspiration. Inspiring people is a multi-billion dollar industry. We all want, crave, and seek it. Inspiration feels great, and we use its energy to make products.

Phase 1, the blank canvas, gets the least amount of air time of the three. Emptiness and nothing? “How abstract, frustrating, and… boring!” you might say. You’re right. But it’s also essential.

The tension of the blank white canvas or page feels so daunting. Why should you make time to sit in it? Without it, the other two don’t flow. The blank canvas is like paying taxes — not sexy but very important.

When in doubt, be blank

Because most of us want to chase that oh-so-good feeling of inspiration or stay outcomes-focused, we can all benefit from carving out time to “be blank”.

Teodora Stoica is a psychologist who studies how the brain changes as we age. Here she summarizes the ideal back-and-forth of the executive control network (ECN) as conductor of the orchestra, and default mode network (DMN) as lighting crew:

The executive control network (ECN) masterfully integrates and directs the activity of different brain regions to complete a specific task.

During intermission, the conductor leaves the stage, and the default mode network (DMN) raises the house lights for a mental break. The DMN underlies delicious escapes into one’s own past or future, expansive imaginary flights into the plots of books or movies, and even manipulations of moral gambits.

Ideally, the two networks oscillate in opposition: the intermission does not interrupt the performance, and the performance does not start unexpectedly during the intermission. This see-saw action creates harmonious mental states associated with increased creativity, mindfulness, and psychological wellbeing.

Daniel Faro. Paint project. Death to Stock.

In museums, the text panel will describe works of art in terms of “medium on support”. One common example you’ve probably seen is “oil on canvas”.

Just as canvas is the support for the art work, empty time and space and the absence of doing support your craft.