a habit I have not been able to kick

When I was a lad of a junior copywriter, I found myself chained to a cubicle in an open concept office with my back to an intersection of two aisles, and over the wall in front of me, a table at which every buyer in the company would approve or, more vocally, disapprove of the work we were doing.

Now, this situation occured before the Internet (as if such a thing is possible) so I didn't have to worry about my boss seeing my Facebook page or anything. But it drove me nuts to attempt any work in that position. For some reason, I can't stand people seeing my work before I'm ready for them to see it. I don't want to share the process of how I get to wherever I'm going. Okay, honestly, I don't want to jinx the thing.

(It was actually easier to write on a bench in the middle of the Eaton Centre. Which I did occasionally.)

On top of that, all the sound that comes from sitting in the middle of a floor of a hundred people simply didn't help me get consistently in the creative groove.

Thus I turned to headphones and a Walkman.

With CFNY (or 102.1, or The Edge, or whatever they're called) blaring the alternative hits of the early and mid '90s, I was able to create a space in which I could focus. I could hear the music without actually listening to it; it provided welcome drive and energy, and handily blocked out external distractions.

This weird totally illusory space in my head turned out to be the perfect place in which to get things done.

And if I got startled by people standing behind me, amusing themselves for minutes on end, or tapping me on the shoulder and watching me jump, so be it. It was the price that had to be paid.

Later, when I got an office at Wunderman, I thought I could at least unplug, close the door and crank the tunes a bit. But after a few hours of being unable to get down to work, I realized that I physically needed the headphones in order to get the necessary focus. (Which might be why the headphone-free writing portion of this video is so bad.) I had trained my brain to need the enclosure. I was hooked.

Still am. No matter where I am, no matter how much privacy I have, I still need to be wearing headphones and be listening to poppy nonsense music – ideally that of the '80s and '90s – in order to get anything done.

plug that metaphor

I've always been a little suspect of metaphors concerning creativity. Much like Sir Bedevere in The Holy Grail ("and that, my lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped") you can too easily find yourself making grandiose statements that aren't tethered to reality, or like anti-evolution creationists, ignoring facts that don't fit your particular grandiosity.

Still, although I can't speak to any theories of creativity or neurology or how the consciousness works, after days and weeks of cranking out ideas and designs and copy and meetings and presentations, at some point you really kind of do need to recharge.

The empty/refill metaphor feels real to me, and I suspect to every creative I've worked with. Because I think we've all been there; feeling listless before you start the job, unable to get excited about anything concerning what you have to do. That's not a good place to be, and you have to do something to change it.

How do I recharge? As you can tell from this little site, photography has become a hobby over the last year. I don't want to say anything in a photograph, I just want to take a picture that makes me want to look at it again. That's an enormously liberating thing when everything you do every day has to have a meaning or ladder back to a strategy.

Two things I don't do enough of are reading (ancient and WW II history mostly) and get to the AGO, where there's generally a good mix of the familiar and the new. (Yeah, I know it's not the Uffizi, but it serves its purpose.)

The only thing I can generalize about is that I think you actively have to do something to recharge; sitting in front of a TV or a computer simply isn't engaging enough, and probably isn't even really relaxing. The best thing you can do may be whatever engages your creativity in a totally different way, and takes you farthest away from whatever you're used to; it may also be the most relaxing thing.

I'm interested in what you the readers of this thing do to recharge, or to revivify whatever creative metaphor you subscribe to. Please share, anonymously if you prefer.