On Creativity, Monet, and Doing the Work

Lately I’ve been experiencing a bit of a creative block. I know the source: too much time in the house. Even as the world opens up a bit, I still spend most of my days at home with a baby too young to be vaccinated. I try to cultivate joy. I try to read, to make art without putting any pressure on how it will turn out. But the truth is, a lot of times when it comes to getting new creative ideas, I feel like my brain is a grey tunnel, and I’ve reached the end, and there’s nothing there but a blank grey wall. 

(I guess I could paint that, but...meh.) 

My husband is a big fan of the book Your Brain At Work by David Rock. When I mentioned I might want to get out of the house and go to a museum to get the creativity flowing again, he told me this is exactly what the book recommends. When we get stuck on a project (or when we can’t come up with anything new), often our impulse is to stay at our desks and keep hammering away. Hard work begets results, right?

But actually, the best thing we can do is take a break. Go for a walk. See something new. Our brains need novelty in order to function--this is why the time in lockdown made so many of us feel foggy. (That, and the added daily bath of stress hormones our brains were receiving. Fun!) 

So I left my toddler with my husband and went to the newly reopened National Gallery of Art.

When you wander around the National Gallery, you’ll see lots of people there on a mission. Students with notebooks, sketching. Or taking notes, thinking of how they’re going to fit their observations into the paper they have to write later. Maybe because I had a lot of assignments like this in school, I went into my day with the same mindset. 

I am here to Get! New! Ideas!

But soon enough, as I wandered the galleries (through WAY more people than I was expecting for a museum still requiring timed entry passes), I felt my constant companion, exhaustion, begin to wash over me. 

My brain isn’t yet ready for discovery. 

It made me think a lot about “wellness” and the tips we try to offer in this space. Here are some tools, here are some strategies, here are things you can do to feel better. Going to a museum was supposed to check that box, right? I was supposed to feel more inspired. To remember what it was like to be out of the house, standing in a room with a Monet and twenty strangely-dressed tourists, the perfect recipe for that sizzle of being alive. 

Instead, I nabbed a spot on the couch in the room with the Monets where I let my exhaustion wash over me, feeling quiet pleasure at my front-row view of Woman with a Parasol, until I realized that if you’re going to catch COVID in the National Gallery of Art, the high traffic means this is the room where it’s gonna happen. 

Ugh. 

So I put away my note-taking brain. I took a moment and sifted myself from the hoards of tourists. I’m not a student on assignment. This isn’t my one chance in life to see the Degas dancer sculptures. Because the Smithsonian museums in DC are free, there’s no need to feel like you have to “get your money’s worth.” Checking the box of every gallery wasn’t going to be a quick fix for my creative block--at least not today. Sometimes the tiredness wins, and you have to move on. 

Instead, I began to treat my day like a visit to an old friend. Hello, Jackson Pollock painting I once sat in front of for an hour, trying to understand. Hello Calder mobiles. Hello Calder mobile shadows. Hello glittery tunnel to the East building where ten years ago I took a photo of my mother laughing. Hello furniture collection my sister always dubs “rich people rooms.” Hello Mary Cassatt painting of the fat pink toddler in a boat.

Though I didn’t speak to another person all day, I arrived back home feeling spent in the same way I would if I’d been with those closest to me. I know them. They know me. Look how we’ve changed. Look how we’re the same. They can hold my exhaustion, my grief, my lack of anything new or interesting to say. It’s okay if we don’t talk on the train home. 

When you’re trying to feel better, it can be tough when the strategies you try (therapy, exercise, meditation, culling toxic relationships) don’t give you the boost of positive feelings you’re expecting. You might go in looking for a re-invigorated version of yourself, but instead you find your same heavy feelings or memories. 

Allow the experience to be what it is. Allow the feelings to have their moment, even if they’re not what you hoped would show up. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of telling you there are still things you need to feel. That your perceived goals aren’t important, or maybe aren’t important today. That doing the work is bigger than one restorative field trip. 

I may have thought I needed to surround myself with something bright and new to feel creative again. But it turns out, what I needed was to spend the day with the ones who are most familiar to me. I needed to be tired in a public place, to close my eyes for a moment while the guards descended on a man wearing a camouflage hat for stepping too close to the water lilies. I needed to give up my agenda and trust that the work knows more than the person trying to do it. I needed to wander. To take no notes. To be among friends.