Lessons from the pandemic: on organizing thoughts and holding on to creativity

I have always considered myself to be pretty self sufficient. It was a result of never feeling involved, not quite fitting in anywhere, always feeling like a wallflower regardless of how much I contributed to the room. I had learned to be content with the idea of being my own woman, with my own set of rules, lessons, and ideas. I was (and still am) a self proclaimed introvert and I was happy with living out that identity to the fullest.

Then the pandemic happened, and as our lives slowed to a crawl, I gradually realized the importance other people, friends and acquaintances, had in my life. Even the pointless chatter with classmates that neither were intellectually stimulating nor particularly rejuvenating, started feeling like a luxury of the past. It was the absence of the chance to speak, to use our tongues to shape thoughts into coherent dialogues.

What I gleaned from this experience is that expression is fundamentally important. It helps one make sense of the whirlwind of thoughts stuck in our heads. It is like untangling a knotted string. Expression is the untangling of thoughts and the pandemic resulted in a stark realisation of how much ‘untangling’ is actually done in the process of simply speaking to our colleagues and friends.

And while some types of thoughts benefit from such discourse, I also think we lose many ideas in casual discussions, ideas that could have significant potential. I’m talking about things like a new book idea, a new business idea, the intuitive nudge pushing you to look into a certain theory to discover its secrets, creative endeavors that when spoken out loud into the void of the universe, tend to disappear and float away into nothingness.

Being in lockdown forced me to confront the system I was using to untangle my thoughts. I didn’t have the quick and easy method of simply speaking about my next big story or painting idea with someone anymore. I had to resort to older, more traditional methods of journaling, having a commonplace or idea book and simply jotting down my ideas and thoughts instead of letting them float out in wisps of words.

The result was that I have been able to create more in the past few months than I have created in years. And by ‘creating’, I mean creating original works, coming up with original ideas.

The point I’m trying to make here is, we have an incredible amount of meaningless, fruitless interactions everyday. We lose so much creative potential and time in making small talk, having unstimulating conversations in order to feel something, in the false hope that perhaps the more we express, the more we can make sense of our existence.

But I feel like the mode of expression matters. The speed of expression matters. Expression for the sake of expression is meaningless. We must stop, gaze inwards and try to untangle those precious little thoughts in private, on paper or canvas or in voice notes.

We must not let our potential, our creativity, and our ideas float away into nothingness riding on tweets and Instagram comments. That is perhaps the biggest challenge to the creative pursuits of our generation.

A beautiful video by my favorite Artist Jordan Clarke on the topic of keeping commonplace books.