A writer friend was trying to sneak in times to journal. She was busy, a commuter. I suggested the subway.
Dumb. I heard it as soon as I said it.
Someone practically sharing the same pair of pants and breathing down her neck squeezed inside a metal underground box? I could see where her privacy would be compromised.
But she could get the relaxing, anxiety-channeling benefits of writing just by scribbling. She could write in place, words on top of each other. Nonsensical writing for the writing of it, just to get it out. She could do it like meditation. She rolled her eyes. But if I shut up every time someone did that I would have quit this gig a long time ago.
Eventually, this gave way to drawing, around and around in circles on paper. It helped center and ground and gather her thoughts for the day, which was what she wanted from her journaling practice to begin with. Plus, it distracted her from the crotches at her eye-level seat.
Doodling, drawing, unconsciously coloring like this is focusing and calming. It’s a healthier way for your mind to unwind than getting sucked into a blue light rabbit hole, as long as you stay away from the edge of the train platform. Those of you who wander around in the margins of papers while you’re on calls might think these are distractions, but it actually helps you concentrate. Your rattled mind, forced to do twenty things at once, is prioritizing, teasing out the tangles. One side of your brain plays, while the other entertains creative problem solving, because we are increasingly adding to the inputs we keep plugged in all the time. For some reason.
This also opens the windows in your head. It lets the air in, so to speak. Any ideas you have floating around get to run around and bump into each other. That home renovation project starts coming together, that delicate situation starts moving toward solution, that cement creative block starts melting like cotton candy in the rain. And if you are aware the gears will turn, you can prepare. You can have a method to capture the answers, knowing they will show up. A conscious system.
My writer friend went to work every day knowing she had to have a clear head, she had to write. But we all have to do something. And that something can get stuck, because we can get caught up in what things have to look like, the way things have to be, the way things are. The way we are.
But scribbling breaks that rule. It lets you do a messy, silly, thing. For no reason. Every day. And every day, the idea of any thing, any way, because you say so, gets more fluid, and more accessible. So, when that upside down struggle, that answer in disguise, shows up - like an Adam Sandler movie where it turns out the love of his life was his kooky next door neighbor Drew Barrymore - you see it before they do.
And maybe you suspect these doodles, these scribbles, might be little bits of genius. Maybe they look like designs, or patterns, or characters, and you start organizing them. Maybe that opens you to other possibilities, and you see ways to compile or compose or create them into a project. One that requires you to see yourself a little differently, as something of a creator, as an artist. Would you have to shift your identity a little?
So this awareness, this productivity, this meditation is a doodle thing? Here comes an existential crisis because of scribbling? Because you got a little conscious of this stuff you do in the margins of your paper when you get anxious during ZOOM meetings?
Please.
That’s as dumb as writing on the subway.