For the third consecutive Wednesday, I went to my local coffee shop to write. As I sat, staring out the shop’s window into a grocery store parking lot, listening to the ladies next to me discuss the merits of whether the kids should be forced to wait at the bus stop when it’s less than twenty degrees outside, a thought would appear in my mind’s eye, I’d attempt to hold it there, then the thought would disappear into the chaos around me. I wrote a few things down. They were terrible, unoriginal, a rehash of something I wrote last week. So, for the third consecutive Wednesday, I trashed what came from my three dollar medium-roast Ethiopian.
The coffee shop, for me, is not a place to write.
Discouraged but somewhat heartened by the simplification of my existence by knowing the coffee shop is no longer a viable work location, I got in my truck and kept the radio off. No podcasting. No Spotify playlisting. Just me and the open road lined by Bojangles and Cracker Barrels. And wouldn’t you know it, as I drove nowhere in particular into countryside I’d never seen, my mind chugged out sentence after sentence after sentence. Was it good? Not really. But it was better than the shit coming from the coffee shop. At a point, I pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway, grabbed my laptop, and typed what became this week’s essay.
The creative process is easier when less is happening. Like in my woodshop, when I choose to keep the music and podcasting off, it’s incredible how much more fulfilling and engaging a piece of furniture becomes. If I can just tolerate the first five minutes of silent boredom.
Lately, I’ve been noticing how much happier I am when my days look and feel closer to what my great-grandparents’ days did. Less distraction. Less choice. And presumably, more creativity. The solution is often less.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
(P.S. Last week, my new book 32 Lessons from 8 Years Lost in Medicine debuted on Amazon and Amazon Kindle. If you’d like to purchase, here’s a link. If you do purchase the book, which helps establish the book atop Amazon’s search, leaving a review further supports that effort. Thank you.)
