I recently redid how my home is laid out. I moved furniture and the like.
What’s interesting about this?
I learned something profound about how to find my “spot” no matter where I am.
Yeah, I rearranged my furniture, and the result is that my space is more conducive to creative flow. But the kicker is that this is true whether I’m home or not.
I approached the process with a different intention. Small shifts can make such a difference.
You’re the space
Setting up a space is not about locking in the right configuration of physical things in an environment. You don't arrive at a supportive environment by deciding, "Now I shall arrange furniture in an optimal way to maximize performance."
I’ll venture to say that everyone reading this wants to experience flow in their creative endeavors. To TMMWers, flow is always welcome in all areas of life. Arranging your environment to foster flow means doing so from the standpoint of flow -- seeing yourself and your stuff not just as a static arrangement of elements in space but as a process. You yourself are a flow of elements, as are your things and your activities.
Right now, I'm located here. My will is activated towards this activity for this purpose. And later, I'll be elsewhere, and I will pick up that other thread and develop it.
So, no, the secret to fostering creative flow is not about having a magical environment. I've written some great stuff when sitting on the bathroom floor of a hotel after being evacuated from a wildfire. It was hot and uncomfortable, and I was exhausted. I've also written some life-changing stuff while working at an elegant desk in a picturesque villa, in an environment that most would agree to be fairly ideal.
The secret -- although it really isn't a secret, it's just overlooked -- is that you carry your best environment-configurator within yourself. The same location becomes something different for the person who intends to make it their home for the time being. To— in Castenada's language— “find your spot.” To weave your intent and your awareness into the current location.
As the space, we cross thresholds
The magic of this weaving becomes especially apparent in moments of transition. Passing through a threshold, entering a new space, carrying your intention with you, the space meets your intention and makes its resources available to you.
Life is a journey of crossing one-way thresholds. Every threshold crossed is a trip you'll never return from.
To believe that you return from a crossed threshold is to claim falsely that you didn't change in the process. Everything matters, and every experience changes you.
We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, a friend from grad school often quoted.
If you consider your working environment not only as a physical space but as a space in the broader context of your life, taking into account your intent as well as physical space and time— well, how would you like to arrange your furniture?
The physical home is not the place you belong. The house is not forever. The book you’re writing isn't forever. What matters most in creative endeavors is that you apply your will and are affected by the process. You embody the space of the project and cross thresholds.
Cross the threshold, make adjustments, and follow the flow
Put love and devotion into your work, and all the best downstream effects can happen: readers love you, money rolls in, and you spend the rest of your life complaining on social media and defending your intellectual property against fan art. (Or maybe you set your sights somewhat higher.)
I've moved around a lot. I have often moved more than once every year, often to a different state. So, for me, it's hard to imagine that any place is my destination.
But while I'm here, I come home to a familiar bed and familiar furniture. The same coffee pot. It's comforting. I've had the experience of traveling for several months and coming home having practically forgotten what my furniture looked like, felt like, the smell of the place I call home for the time being.
It all comes back. If you never leave and return, are you really conscious of what your environment feels like? We sense things all the time that pass unnoticed.
Even though everything is temporary, a space needs to be set up in line with some purpose. This means making adjustments that suit your intent.
The default settings for most houses have purposes that don’t suit creative flow:
the "living room"
the bedroom - "that place where the bed goes"
some homes have a "mud room" - which is nicely evocative
Deconstruct the concept of the house based on the zones that support what you intend to create.
Zones
When I lived in a van, you'd think it would all have felt like one room -- and a cramped one at that. But, there was a bathroom, a front cabin, and palpably distinct zones... kitchen zone, shower zone, desk zone, bed zone.
Whether I'm in a simple two-bedroom apartment, a downtown highrise, a sprawling house, or on the road, I want my space to support me. More than that, I want to weave my presence into my space.
This entails, partly, acquainting myself with how a space can support the different parts of me and the things I want to do.
When I sit here, does it bring me up or bring me down?
Can I shift things around so that no matter where I go, I'll feel supported?
Maybe you've had the experience of noticing how different spaces carry a memory of what happened just prior or the ambient vibe from recurring events.
Sometimes, by shifting things around, it breaks the crust of that memory and stirs the vibe into a more fertile chaos from which something new can emerge.
So it's about moving furniture, not to feather your nest, but to click in more of yourself.
Here, I'm not advocating fussing with things -- the typical example of a procrastinator insisting on a clean and orderly desk as if that were the barrier to getting things done.
I'm advocating to accept that the riprap path is the best one. A riprap is a path made from loose stones. Nothing glamorous, but it gets you there. A perfect path is a myth. A perfect path will prove to be the worst option because it will never arrive.
Riprap
BY GARY SNYDER
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Riprap workstations
I've learned a lot from moving around and living in very different environments.
Much of it was driven by the quest for the environment most conducive to what's most alive for me for this phase, a quest that drove me from Virginia to a property in Big Sur or from a high rise to the desert.
I don't mean to make it sound easy. For one, moving around has been expensive—to actually shift one's base of operations rather than simply travel and return.
The process has removed from me the belief that I will at some point "settle down," not only because experience has shown it to be an increasingly unlikely scenario, but also because settling is not the prime objective. Settling down would mean no longer growing, expanding, and taking on new things.
This world is not my home, we could all say.
We're here for a time. It’s a precious opportunity.
Let's create, and be affected by the act of creation.