The funniest thing about being "too busy" to do anything creative is the inherent juxtaposition that occurs. Simply, the busier I am, the more creative I become. This is not exactly a new idea (see: Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, as well as, likely, countless other works and studies on the matter of human creativity and problem solving) but for me, the contrast between my productive times and my less productive times is always tinged with tragedy.
Until I began this project, I had been facing down massive amounts of spare time. Coincidentally, when I began my hours-of-reading-a-day project, I also came into a great deal more hours at my job. This has left me with much less time to indulge my creative impulses. Largely, I expected no issue in this, as I had very little creative impulse to speak of until ten days ago when I started all this. Tonight, however, and all the ten nights barring one since this began, I have been positively electrified by ideas and creativity.
I think this reflects back to a sort of vital middle ground. There is a fine line between "doing too much" and "doing just enough," as well as "doing just enough" and "not doing quite enough." I felt I had long been on the "too much" side of that line, but have recently realized that I was on the "just enough" spot on the spectrum. Since August, I was most certainly on the "not enough" side, whereas just recently I have come back to the "just enough" point. I remember, and am so glad to experience again, this frustration- having ideas and not having the time to execute them. Without it, I felt like a shadow of myself.
This all does, thankfully, relate back yet again to my good friend Marcel and his brilliant work. Tonight, I reached a passage that resonated with me instantly:
"And since complete inactivity in the end has the same effect as prolonged overwork, in the mental sphere as much as in the life of the body and the muscles, the steadfast intellectual nullity that reigned behind Octave's meditative brow had ended by giving him, despite his air of unruffled calm, ineffectual longings to think which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought philosopher." (Proust, 939)
A few things here... First, I slept like absolute shit for months; specifically, the gap between leaving my last job and beginning this project. Second, I spent those nights awake with a shifting, swirling sea of ultimately pointless trains of thought, if they can even be called "thought," and strings of linked self-indulgent anxieties. Since busying myself with something, though, in my idle times, not only have I found my waking hours to be more "awake," in that my creative side is finally functioning once again, but sleep has at last returned to me, and I wake up knowing that I did not spend the bulk of every hour counting backwards from miserable until I fell back asleep.
Of course, there is a desperate need for a middle ground as previously mentioned. As I have found it by doing more, some must find it by doing less. This is dependent less on one's composure or nature, but rather, by the circumstances one is in. I suspect M. Proust would agree here, as he stated it outright in these final pages of Budding Grove, that we must make sure to let our minds lay fallow for sometime, in order that during a productive time, we can fully reap the benefits of a healthy mind.
Achievement unlocked: 1,000 page mark surpassed!
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