Mental Space

This December I’ve been running down a large James Baldwin rabbit hole. I’m not sure where it came from, his work can envoke some serious emotions. When I found myself a bit overloaded I turned to the book Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs. Still heavy, but different.

As I read the biography I was reminded just how many times the author describes Baldwin’s need for silence and solitude to get his creative work done and how the stresses of obligation got in the way of his creative work.

Few of us are going to have the types of obligations that James Baldwin had, but we’ll still face our own set of obligations. Especially in the holiday season when it seems everyone from every direction seems to want us to do something for them or to help them or to break ourselves away from our creative work to be present with them.

It can be difficult, we’ll either use the work as an excuse to avoid those obligations or use the obligations as and excuse to avoid the work.

Both of those are a trap. While we can’t to both perfectly we can fit space in for each for a month.

The real challenge comes in the other 11 months out of the year. How can we facilitate that mental space we need to do our creative work? Few of use have the opportunities Baldwin made for himself in being able to fly across an ocean to get away from it all. Although he did make those opportunities for himself dealing with obstacles few of us will see, let alone face.

With much smaller obstacles and much smaller obligations our methods for setting aside the mental space to do our creative work are hopefully equally smaller. In the “room of one’s own” sort of range. Or perhaps on our Christmas list we need to add in some Noise Canceling Headphones so we can build our own space.