Let Walking Be Your Reset Button
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Because Control-Alt-Delete doesn’t work in the real world.
The Secondhand Inspiration Project begins with a motivational quote and ventures wherever the creative path meanders.
“When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It’s just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.” ― Jim Butcher
It is a typical Friday afternoon mired in stress. A deadline looms, and a client is demanding their deliverables. Your team, in various locations due to COVID, seems inefficient working remotely. Each task feels like a loose end begging to get tied up, and all you want to do is slam your fists on your desk and curse.
It is another late evening sitting with your laptop open. You find yourself caught in the tangles of another creative dead end. Only a handful of sentences grace the screen, a tiny yield for the hours you donated to your craft. You have squandered another chance to make progress on your novel. Doubt triggers the usual negative internal dialogue as you mentally debate if you are a writer since you cannot write…anything.
Home should be peaceful, but things tonight seem steeped in frustration. Your spouse refuses to help with household tasks, your children are rowdy and belligerent, no one displayed a lick of appreciation for the meal you prepared, a pet just made a mess on the carpet, and all you want to do is scream at the chaos.
The above scenarios probably seem frustrating yet familiar — you or somebody you know have faced a variation of them in the past week. If these moments were part of a video game, you might pout, throw a tantrum, and then start over rather than deal with the consequences of snap judgments and sketchy decisions.
So what can you do to hit the restart button in real life? Often, I resort to the basic yet time-tested act of walking.
The human body has been engineered in a manner that has made us amazingly efficient at walking. Most…
