My Best Work Happens When My Mind Feels Quiet
Over the past two years, I increasingly notice something: I do much of my best work when I’m not really thinking. Or rather, since the mind is a thinking machine that rarely stops, I should say I do my best work when my mind feels like I’m not really thinking. When my mind feels quiet.
The Difference Between Quiet Mind and Mental Noise
This is what I don’t mean by “not really thinking.” I don’t mean the distracting, ruminative cacophony I sometimes have in my head, so noisy I can’t separate out the strands. This sort of “not thinking” is like a knotted skein. When I’m in that state, I have no idea what on God’s earth I’ve been thinking.
What Productive Non-Thinking Actually Feels Like
The “not-thinking” to which I refer is more like a gentle stream going by, untroubling and non-distracting—and somehow it serves me. In these moments, thought is happening—but it’s off somewhere alongside me. And it seems to serve me without effort.
Remarkably, I’m often in this state while doing the things I do best. Art-creating, editing, and gardening are high on the list. When I’m creating an art quilt, piecing fabrics abstractly—layer upon layer, texture upon texture, combining color and pattern, I often pay attention to an audiobook or even daydream, and the art-creation happens much more by instinct than thought. On occasion, I notice something isn’t quite working, so I step back and seriously think through the problem, making adjustments. But these moments of concentrated thought are the exception.
Flow State Creativity, Practice, and Letting Instinct Lead
I can say the same for creating with clay, or “painting with plants,” which I often do in the garden. Getting to this flow state of instinct likely happens because of years of practice—hits and misses—and studying the techniques of others, which is thought-full. But now when I’m creating in a familiar medium, it feels best to let instinct override thought. I am not an athlete and have never been, but I wonder if athletes perform similarly, by instinct, and if in their process, thought becomes a quiet stream alongside them. I know people who actually run for this experience, for the way it quiets ruminative thinking.
Most surprising to me is how, while editing, my mind is operating instinctively. I’m not consciously thinking Oh, a comma would make this better, or This block quote is not formatted properly. I just make the changes. At times a conundrum presents itself and requires more conscious thinking. But again, these moments are the exception.
Why Creating Works Better for Me Than Meditation
As I’ve said, productive not-thinking doesn’t happen because of effort. On the other hand, meditating, for me, has always felt effort-full. But what I experience in the act of creating, or the act of instinctual productivity, feels meditative. Meditation as a practice I’ve mostly found grueling and troublesome, though I have close friends who achieve peace and clarity through it. Meditation serves them well, while art serves me. Gardening serves me. Walking aimlessly serves me.
Michael Pollan on Daydreaming
While pondering these experiences, I happened onto a conversation between the writer Michael Pollan and Ezra Klein about Pollan’s new book on consciousness. In the part that piqued my interest, they discussed daydreaming. I share snippets of the conversation here:
Pollan: There’s a meditation teacher named Michael Taft, whom I really like and whose meditations are on YouTube. His attitude is: Look, the machinery of the mind is going to go on, but just put it down the way you’d put down your phone. Just let it do its thing. You can just ignore it.
I find that very helpful. I have this sense of a little buzzing going on in this corner of thoughts that I’m not paying attention to.
…I talk a lot about how psychedelics inspired this book. But meditation did, too. Because as soon as you stop to examine what’s going on in your mind … you realize how strange our minds are, and how little volition is involved. We think we’re calling the shots as conscious human beings, but to a remarkable extent, we’re not.
… the wandering mind is what’s happening when you’re bored. That’s the precondition, in a way, for a wandering mind: I’ve got nothing to do. … And suddenly we’re off and daydreaming, or mind wandering. They’re very similar things. … So they just think this is a space of creativity, and that a lot of creative thinking comes out of mind wandering and daydreaming.
It’s something novelists do all the time, right? They get pretty good at daydreaming.
Daydreamers Are Not Lost — We Are Found
I have always been a daydreamer, in a most productive way. But being a daydreamer has not always been lauded. Commonly, daydreamers are described as “lost in thought.” But what if we daydreamers are actually quite found? I am also highly perceptive, and it’s strange how the two things work together: the wandering mind and the highly-perceptive mind. I notice a thousand things my husband—very differently wired than I am—never notices. How could I be lost and yet so very awake to sensation and detail and what is happening around me? …Thanks, Michael Pollan, for calling attention to this paradox.
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Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal
Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.
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