Tenuous as a spider web

A couple of months ago, I discussed how creativity and the new ideas that it might be hatching could be very greedy, repeatedly jumping into the focus of our attention at the slightest provocation, always finding new anchors to make them relevant to the situation at hand, turning them into a looming presence that feed from every minute and every second of your day until they are ripe to be put into words and the pressure is relieved. However, this does not always happen in that way.

The last two weeks have been a blizzard of activity with our trip to the beach and it pains me to admit how much the situation has effectively dismantled my ability to write. It is indisputably true that this trip was trickier than usual because of all the COVID related restrictions and requirements, but I never expected it to render me to all effects unable to write a single article in two weeks. I have been in various family vacations in the past, both as a parent and as child, and I was fully aware that certain types of trips are so demanding from the physical and the attention point of view that they actually leave very little room for any kind of reflection: the usual excursion of three cities in three days can not only overload your senses but it can even show somatic effects such as dizziness, heart racing, in the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Alternatively, when long stretches of driving are involved, the task, which is normally performed in an almost automatic manner, can become rather taxing, to the point that the moment you are not driving anymore you just fall asleep like a rock (and sometimes even dream of driving on).

Photo: Eric Kilby

However, this occasion was intended as relaxing and fairly laid-back: without all the basic cooking and cleaning needs covered, we only had to plan how to have fun, and even that only in limited amounts since the boys stated very clearly that they were not ready to spend their holidays "looking at stones". As a result of this combination, we have typically spent one to two hours at the swimming pool every day and about the same time driving around for sightseeing. In summary, I should have had more than enough time to concoct some ideas, blend them with the new experiences of the day and find a moment to put them into some kind of written form, either digital or analog. But that just did not happen, not a single day.

It turns out that driving in unfamiliar environment is rather demanding even for short stretches. A half hour drive left me almost no time to go into full autonomous mode: with ten minutes to reach the highway through a crisscross of streets and roundabouts, a couple of minutes to determine the name of our exit and how far it was, and the another ten minutes from the highway to our destination, I had to devote my full attention for the whole duration of the drive.

In the swimming pool, even if my life was not at stake if my focus strayed away, I did not have much better luck: the sensations of floating in the water or feeling the sun on the skin felt so far away that they were almost new, exciting my nerves and my muscles, demanding a substantial cutback on cognitive functions to rely purely on the sensory ones. It happens to me from time to time, that my sense require my full attention for some minutes and I just gladly yield, used to having a head always bustling with ideas, letting them cool down for a few moments is quite convenient.

As a consequence of all these circumstances and all the new scenes that we got to see (in spite of Jason's and Trevor's resistance) the tenuous web that build the substrate of my writing never got to grow robust enough. I did have a couple of ideas that I would have loved to explore, but I decided to archive them in the drawer of "to be written" and just keep observing and absorbing my surroundings, lest I would miss something interesting or beautiful.

Although we came back on Wednesday and I still had two more free days, helping Karen with the cleaning up did not leave much time for weaving words either. Luckily, we are now settled back into our usual routines and the evening articles will be coming to you regularly once more (or so I hope), including in particular some of the insights gained during the trip. Have a nice week.