3 Grounding Habits for This Restless Creative
I am hopelessly, irreparably, and flagrantly not a creature of habit. Though I celebrate that about me, it can sometimes feel like an affliction.
I thrive in novelty, variety, and a regular dose of imbalance. The moment I settle into a routine, I can’t help breaking it—just because.
I can, however, stay long-term in a place or a job for up to five years, then I’ll move on. With my current job as a college instructor, I survived for 15 years only because it allowed me to take up to two years of leave without pay. Leaves like this made it possible for me to live various alternative lives during which I wrote, helped run restaurants with my husband, hosted an Airbnb. I mothered, traveled, and hustled before falling back on my academic day job for a few more years. Then I’d uproot myself again.
I can’t stay in one place or in the same job without folding something new into the old. Or, more drastically, without throwing in a monkey wrench just to shake things up. Which is perhaps why I thrived as a teacher on yearly contracts: though I teach some of the same courses, I can update my reading lists every time I teach them. I don’t have to commit to the exact same content every time I teach. It also helps that I take regular breaks for “industry immersion” outside academia. As a creative, an academic, and as a person, I’ve always valued multiple and alternative perspectives, and I feed those back into my teaching.
Regular resets, total transformations—I live for pursuits like this.
These are the joys and afflictions of a restless, creative spirit. The serial obsession with beginning and finishing one project after another. The chasing after change. The insisting on change, not just the acceptance of it, as a constant.
However, even restless, creative spirits need grounding.
What gives me the confidence to fly about is the fact that I can fall back on a few grounding foundations. For me, what works are these three habits. They’re not habits in the strict sense, because I don’t do them like clockwork. But whenever I’m feeling a little lost or stuck, I can depend on doing them to help me regain my footing.
1. Swimming
I feel grounded when I float.
I grew up landlocked and learned how to swim only three years ago, when I signed up for swimming lessons. I took up swimming when a doctor advised me to take up a sport to help manage my migraines.
I was into weights training for years, but I quit when it became boring and repetitive. I tried yoga and pilates, but I found them too strenuous and not relaxing at all. With swimming, though the strokes are rhythmic and repetitive, the immersion into an alien environment provides enough detachment for a momentary mental reset.
Swimming works for me as a low-impact sport that also lowers my blood pressure. The sensation of floating doesn’t just calm and soothe. Most importantly for the creative, it transports. In this alien environment of inverted gravity (where we float rather than fall), we get to know and move our bodies in ways that we don’t ordinarily experience, being the terrestrial, air-breathing creatures that we are.
Underwater we breathe out, and who knew how prolonged a moment could be within the span of a breath? Time is compressed and becomes as dense as water. Movement is slowed to a gliding, graceful pace.
Underwater fun begins when feet no longer touch the ground, and we are suspended in mid-space.
When it became clear that swimming was necessary for my physical, mental, and creative health, my family and I moved to a place near a pool. It’s no beach or sea, but living near water allowed me to get into the habit of removing myself from constraining situations from time to time. The cool blankness of water clears and cleanses my soul. When I reemerge, I’m refreshed and renewed: my migraines are kept at bay, my hypertension is controlled, and I’m restored to a state of peace.
2. Notetaking
Most times, I understand something differently when I process my thoughts in writing.
For many people, it’s talking to someone that does this for them. When you’re alone with your mumbo-jumbo of thoughts, it’s hard to discern a pattern or bring ideas to a conclusion. But when you talk it out with someone, the process of making what’s on your mind comprehensible to another person makes it comprehensible to you, too.
For me, that other someone is usually myself, but I don’t talk to myself. I write. When I’m confused or overwhelmed, I open a notebook and write. Writing untangles and unravels what’s exciting me, or what’s bothering me. I usually don’t know what I’ll end up thinking when the writing is done, which makes writing a process of discovery. I don’t write because I already know. I write because I don’t know what I want to know.
I’m an avid notetaker, and I keep several notebooks. Aside from my journal for personal stuff, I have my huge notebooks for taking down notes from books and articles. I like them huge because I take down copious amounts of notes—bibliographic information, facts and their source, direct quotations, my own paraphrases of the author’s ideas. I mark it out prominently on the page where I’ve written down my own developing thoughts, usually beside or around the author’s ideas that provoked them.
As a researcher, it has become second nature for me clearly separate my own thoughts from the authors I’m reading. This doesn’t just prevent plagiarism. It also allows me to appreciate how my own ideas can differ from or develop from the seed of other authors’ works. It allows me to see my inner world, right there externalized on the page.
Aside from my personal journal and my huge research notebooks, I keep a third one—my meta-notebook. It’s a notebook for reflecting on what my other notebooks contain. I like reading my notebooks, especially entries from the past, because they surprise me. When I read several of these past entries from both my journal and my research notes, I get to piece together a new understanding that had been developing over long stretches of time but I was not, during those times, consciously aware of. My two other notebooks are timebound, each page records only my thoughts at the moment of writing. The meta-notebook is for drawing an arc, for the overarching view, for defining my major takeaways.
I love the meta-notebook the most because it’s the most grounding of the three. But I cannot write on it unless I’ve first filled the other two.
3. Playing With My Kids
A major part of my selfhood is my motherhood, which surprises me. I didn’t have a blissful childhood. I grew up detached from my parents.
Many people observe from their own life experience that their love language tends to take the form of what they lacked as a child. Like, if you grew up materially deprived, your love language tends to be lavish gift-giving to loved ones. If you grew up deprived of physical touch, you tend to be physically expressive when you love. And so on.
Perhaps because of my feelings of detachment growing up, I developed an attachment parenting style. It grounds me as a parent, as I believe it also grounds my kids to feelings of trust and self-assurance, which I lacked growing up.
Attachment for me means more than giving plenty of hugs and kisses, or “wearing my baby” as I move about. Attachment for me mostly involves playing with them, getting into their inner world. As a creative, it affords me a whimsical and childlike perspective rooted in our familiar, shared experience of home. As a mother, it helps me grow in empathy. As a person, it helps me learn to set aside my limiting perspectives and see the world from other people’s eyes, aside from my children’s.
Swimming and notetaking are introspective habits that ground me to my inner world. Playing with my kids, in contrast, take me out of myself so I’d be fascinated with and respectful of other people’s inner worlds, too.
So, there you go. It’s swimming, notetaking, and playing with my kids. My habits are nothing unusual. But to me, they’re special for my grounding and growth, wherever life takes me.
This story was first published by 3 Things on Medium, June 24, 2021. Here’s the link.
Photo credits:
Featured photo: Natalie from Pexels.
Photo in 1. Swimming: Camila Cordeiro from Pexels.
Photo in 2. Notetaking: Lisa Fotios from Pexels.
Photo in 3. Playing with My Children: Jep Gambardella from Pexels.