It’s sort of inevitable if you’re living a creative life – and we’re all living a creative life –

eventually you get stuck.

Call it writer’s block or painter’s block or mommy-cannot-think-of-one-more-activity-today block. Or just call it getting stuck.

The fact is, it’s going to happen. Someday you’re just going to find yourself out of ideas.

Completely.

You could, of course, work through it. Plenty of people tout this strategy. Sometimes you have to just work through it. You might have a deadline to meet. You might honestly have no option other than to just do what you can with whatever you have and hope for the best, but you know you’re not quite “there”, creatively-speaking.

People call it “flow” or being “in the zone” – that lovely mountaintop experience when everything is going so incredibly well and creativity is simply pouring out of us.

We’d all like to stay up there on that mountaintop, unpack our things and move in. Live there forever. But none of us does.

Okay, maybe Bach did. But other than him, I don’t know of anyone who does or did.

So what is a stymied writer, or an out-of-ideas mom to do when she’s just simply run out of ideas?

Fill the well.

Bring creativity back into your life and into your day, by dipping your bucket into the well of something, anything, that takes you out of your normal and into something delightfully different.

I’m not talking about a trip around the world, just a jaunt to someplace with sights or sounds or tastes or experiences that are not your norm.

A visit to a craft store, museum, fabric shop.

A walk on a trail that you haven’t walked before.

Visiting the dollar store (or five-and-dime, if there even are any of those left!).

Visiting a music store.

It sounds crazy-simple, but some of the best ideas are just that.

And it works.

Visiting a nursery or a florist and picking out one small potted plant or half-a-dozen perfect stems to put in a vase or an old milk jar does indeed shift the cosmos just a bit, sometimes just enough to get you unstuck and back up on the mountaintop where you belong.

I don’t know how it works. I have no way of knowing such a thing. And honestly? I don’t even want to know.

How and why we humans come up with ideas is a mystery to me, and I sort of prefer it that way. I’d much rather be astonished at someone’s creativity than pick apart how they came up with the idea.

I’d just rather be delighted with what creativity offers – others’ creativity, and my own – the same way a child is delighted on Christmas morning.

I can’t tell you why visiting a playground and swinging on the swings somehow helps you figure out the next chapter or the right brushstroke or a new arrangement for the living room.

But I can tell you that somehow, delightfully, it does.

~xo,
LuAnne