What Energizes Your Creative Thinking?

     For me it’s water: A cascading waterfall; the ceaseless susurration of the waves of the sea; wind-whipped whitecaps; a burbling stream; ripple of sunlight reflecting off a lake, a pond, a pool…

     Being around water not only soothes and relaxes me, but also sets my imagination free to float and flow, as if buoyed by an ever-strengthening current and carried on an in-coming tide.

     While I love to get near water as often as possible, and also delight in swimming in it if it is warm enough, I experience the same unleashing of creativity by simply standing in the shower! I wish someone would invent some kind of white-board for the shower with a pen that is both waterproof and washable! I often linger in the shower, relishing the confluence of relaxation and released imagination. The only problem is, by the time I get out and towel off, I can’t write all the resulting ideas down fast enough, before at least one or two have flapped their wings and taken flight through the nearest hole in my brain!

     However, it does help to know this about myself – that being around water stimulates my creative thinking. Whenever I feel stale or stagnant, I know it is time to escape to the most accessible body of water and allow myself to just “be”.

     All of which bring me to the question I began with: What stimulates your creative thinking? Identifying this may be one of several steps towards getting “unstuck” in your own writing. If you don’t yet know the answer to this question, it may take some self-observation and self-awareness, along with asking those nearest and dearest to you whether they have noticed the specific circumstances that seem to trigger your most creative ideas.

     Learning to maximize the kind of environment, activity, or circumstances that energize your own creative thinking, and to capture and harness the resultant thoughts and ideas, may help you on the way to breakthrough in your writing.