Often, I take a quiet hour or so out of my day, and walk a loop up and behind the campus or down to the Connecticut River and back home. And it can be amazing to do this in silence.
My body starts off arrhythmically stumbling out the door and dodging a few cars. but, relatively quickly a pattern starts to internalize into a rhythm. And that rhythm isn’t always the same; it can reflect differences in my body or in the world around me.
Walking in silence, not even an audiobook or a podcast, can feel strange at first, but once the feeling, the downbeat, of the walk has become its most noticeable, it too starts to fade into the background. The walk becomes a meditation.
The quiet needs time to establish itself, settle in, and relax me, before my creative brain really takes hold.
When it does, it can lead me back to a performance I am researching or currently recording. New ways of playing a part or interpreting an intention just happen. And, instead of breaking my stride to write down or record the thought, I resolve to live with it, letting it stew for the rest of the journey. So I arrive home with a more mature idea ready to go.
I think that walking in this focused/unfocused way during the transition between day and night also helps. Thresholds, times and places that are not either but both, help remove limits for me.
It can feel counterintuitive to say that we need to stop working so hard to find the answers to make the space needed for the answers to emerge.
Take some time. Find some silence. Make some art.