Sources Say: Taking a bath MAY be Economically and Politically Neutral
My old shower was full-sized, but it didn't have a bath; there was just a small lip on the bottom. Uninteresting. But my new place has a full-sized shower and bathtub, which is an upgrade. When I was moving, I found a year-old Lush bath bomb (which I realize is technically "outside of its shelf life"), but I used it anyway, and it was very nice. I partially used it to listen to an audiobook and partially used it to listen to a podcast on journaling. I was initially planning on journaling tonight, except I left my journal in my car, and I didn't want to go get it, so I decided to post online instead. Yesterday, I realized how I hadn't told my therapist about my blog, but she thought it was funny that this was what I gravitated towards for my creative outlet. One of the reasons why I decided that I wanted to pursue this creative project is a) I think having some sort of creative outlet within reach at any given moment of your life is vital to the success of our mind-body-soul connection, and b) I needed something that supported my specific needs beyond what F*c*b**k (for all you know this could mean Fuckbook and you would never be the wiser,) and whatever other social media app could give me. A lot of times people avoid long anecdotal instagram captions and I keep getting far right propoganda with Facebook ads and I am tired off it, the only reason I regularly check Facebook is for Della Redmond.
The second skill that I think is important to exercise regularly in different environments is general cognition.
Moving to a hot-button issue: AI. :(. One of the projects I had to complete for a final was putting together a hypothetical handbook for a music class I would hypothetically teach in the future. While this could very easily be written by chat GP-suck-my-Toe, there of course was purpose and intention behind the assignment that would benefit us in the future. In this hypothetical job, I may get a job involving a marching band on August 15th, when I have 3 weeks to prep for said new job, I am going to have parents asking me about attendance policies, and lo and behold, I already have a principle foundation that I can now apply to my specific situation. I digress, this is not important to the point. In the class discussion we had about AI, one of my instructor's siblings, who is also in higher academia, said, something along the lines of "When people choose to have AI do their assignments for them, they aren't struggling with the writing, they're avoiding the thinking." When I discussed this with Eliza, she made the excellent point that us academic yappers can't use AI for this kind of thing because we have thought processes and only we know what we want to say it and how we want to say it, and by the time I have written the question to ask AI to write it, I might as well have just written it myself.
Sidenote: I joked that Eliza and I missed an opportunity for a podcast in college, and she joked that instead, I need to give her a column on my blog, and as many times as I reference her pedagogical bars, she might be right.
Another tidbit is that I also long for connection pretty heavily, sometimes to my own detriment, (I am working on it,) but this allows me to break the fourth-wall of journalling and share what is happening in my brain because it's kind of scary in there sometimes, despite my psychiatrist saying "I am putting a big beige, 'UNREMARKABLE' on your psych chart." I digress further.
I believe in creativity as a necessity for everyone, which is one of the reasons why I am going into the field that I am because kids need that opportunity. With the accessibility to constant dopamine hits, I find it beneficial for me to have multiple more intentional ways of exercising creative cognition, depending on what I need in a particular moment. If I can put in the effort for something more free-flowing, I will write, and that may be on my blog or prepping for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Sometimes thought I needed something that just allows me to keep my hands busy, that is more repetitive, and this was something I realized approximately 31 hours before writing this.
Around that 31-hour-ago mark, I was in therapy and was telling a story about a couple of examples that kind of fit in this one behavioral pattern. The most recent one I could think of was:
I didn't mention that it was repetative or make any connection to the safety of my painting table and my LEGO table as a kid, (another frequent safe place for me,) but being that she is a therapist and I am not, she clocked it and we talked about my brain tends to feel the most at ease when I am doing something repetative with my hands (Fidget Spinners HATED to see me coming.)
Mind the Gap
Third and final digression. Creativity doesn't have to be a Big Deal. It can be as common as taking a vitamin daily. It just needs to be accessible. Starting is one of the hardest parts in almost anything, especially anything personal and creative, and I struggle with it all the time when I am trying to figure out the color scheme of my orc miniatures. One of my favorite creative principles is called "the Gap," and it is from an NPR segment by Ira Glass.
There are two places we can identify in creative works, and those are taste and our current skill level. We like the things we like, but they are also made by incredibly skilled people, and when we make something similar, it usually isn't up to that standard. The discomfort we feel in recognizing we are not at the same skill level is called the gap. In the gap, we have the perception skills to see this thing we like, but we can also identify the differences between what we make and what we indulge in. Ira Glass says the best way to overcome this is to do it a lot. And this isn't necessarily practicing. A distinction I make in music a lot is that there is a difference between knowing how to play a lot and knowing how to practice a lot, but there is space for both repetition and practice in overcoming the gap. Sometimes the purpose is just getting words on a page daily, and sometimes it's diving deep into a certain writing technique. Sometimes I just want to put a landscape on the canvas, sometimes I want to actually work on water reflection technique. Sometimes I want to go just scream into the treble clef staff on my euphonium, sometimes I have to do my scales. But on the other end of things, engaging in our taste also makes us better. Listening makes us better musicians because every time I get up on a podium, I have an idea of what I want something to sound like based on my tastes, but the gap is how I communicate that to the ensemble to get the sound that I want. Reading makes us better writers and communicators, and looking at art makes us better artists. Reading used to be really hard for me, and honestly, still is when it comes to focus for long periods, but I used to think that I only liked writing and that reading was whatever, but of course, I eventually had the realization that this cannot be true, and they go hand in hand.
And You did it at my Birthday Dinner.
All of this comes with knowing the Time and Place for where this fits into our lives. I try to be more versatile in my creative outlets so that I can constantly rotate to fit whatever disconnect I am feeling in my brain that I feel the need to rectify. It's one of the reasons I don't like to focus on one specific medium, so that I don't exhaust a safe space for my brain to the point where it doesn't feel safe anymore.
This tends to be what my schedule will look like on a given week (not to brag), and this is outside of timeblocking, so those events are usually in-person obligations I need to be at. So the best way that I can still add those creative bits in my life is by having them ready at a moment's notice.
However, all of this being said, sometimes we just need a bath where you can sit and indulge in whatever feels right, whether it's specific content, or just your own inner demons, having a fallback to clear out your brain and allowing yourself to relax is a great way to both protect your inner peace but also a step closer to fighting anti-intellectualism. So go take a bath.