Grow nothing but relaxed

You have a crop growing in your head. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what kind.

It’s a crop reflective of your own tastes and behavior and maybe even appearance.  (I suspect Dick Cheney’s is Brussels sprouts.) But whatever it is, you keep producing it too long and you deplete your brain. 

See, creativity is like farming ideas. (Well, at least, the fertilizers are similar.) A tour of the Internet reveals that there are a lot of people out there trying to help you figure out how to grow creative ideas more often and more efficiently in all kinds of fields,  from education to business to dance. Whole systems resembling irrigation networks have been developed to permit you to be creative on demand, as many of us have to be in our particular occupations.

And yet, as any farmer can tell you, you can’t keep raising the same thing in the same spot for years and years without wearing out the soil. And you can feel when that soil has about turned to gravel, can’t you? All those pathetic little gray cells surrendering,  piling up in strata of calcified corpses. Nothing but weeds going to be coming out of that wasteland.

This is why people in their 50s  flip out and start entirely new careers or  sell everything they own and take to the highway in campers. They know instinctively that they better rotate those crops, let the south 40 go fallow or become mental brownfields.  

It’s better not to let yourself get to that  level of sterility. I don’t know how many of these get-creative philosophies and regimens admit the success of this tactic but, frankly, sometimes – and more often than you’re letting yourself – the best way to be creative is not to think at all.

Luckily, it’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the impulses and opportunities for flatlining are  rich, indeed. We just have to take them. None of your half-hour meditations or 10-minute power naps or 30-second screen breaks, either. Those are important only during the other three seasons when there aren’t hammocks to lie in, beaches to read on and bright sun to bake our empty skulls like clay pots.

It’s time to slowly, indulgently and unconsciously refill those skulls with impressions and experiences to quietly feed the seeds of thought that will only later sprout into fresh ideas. That’s why it’s a terrible idea to make children go to school nearly year-round, and an excellent plan to make like the French and just shut down for an entire month. 

So go see junky movies and soak in the pool and drink icy stuff from frosted glasses until you slosh. Let the gray matter recuperate.  Your imagination will be a lot more fertile by September.  

This is your brain.

This is your brain on vacation.