I get the feeling more and more that our brains operate with their own rhythm that can differ quite a lot from person to person and the various aspects of life can get in the way and change the rhythm to a less natural one. Everyone has their own natural pacemaker and for some, it goes wacky and they need an artificial pacemaker installed to tell their heart “this is how you should be ticking”. What if life is like some overbearing artificial pacemaker?
Maybe our natural rhythm is jazz or hip-hop or trance. It’s like you hear a sound from a band and within a few seconds everything clicks into place and you’re in synch with them. That pacing has always been there, it’s why it fits so well. Many of us go from artificial structure to artificial structure in life. From school to college, to work, fitting into a pattern made by another. Working for my self the past year and a bit, doing what I want, when I want to do it, I started falling into a different pattern, my soul’s song got stronger the more I turned off the music of the world around me. How in fuck’s name can you be good in business or life when you are tied to a 9 to 5 lifestyle? Fun is 24/7 and business creativity can be spread over that too.
And with my change of working and living came new ways of thinking and while not a calm, a natural ebb and flow resulted. I could understand things more, I appreciated new things and all the time enjoyed a different sanity. From what I can tell, artists are solitary in nature. They create on their own; they compose music, paint, draw, code as individuals. Creativity is solitary, displaying of it, is not. Allowing yourself to think, not squeezing your brain to perform will get other parts of the brain to start working and interacting. Genius business people are the mavericks; they are the loners, the people away from the crowd. It’s not a circadian movement they have going on but I wonder are they the ones that are letting their inner song through?
My soul detoxified by removing elements, doing things for fun, breaking out of grooves my brain was forced into. Maybe this is like people who don’t know they have allergies and when they address them, they feel better and are better. I attended a voice training workshop in the Gaiety school of acting a while back. It was a full day event and most of the day was spent on how to breathe. For most of us, it was how to change how you breathe and use muscles in a different way. It really was a fascinating course and I learned a lot. One of the things we did was finding your “natural” voice. Through various exercises you can find the sound that sits best with your body and your vocal chords.
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It’s like a sleeping pattern, it took me a while to find mine and eventually I was getting 9-10 hours a night and felt like I was a ninja during the waking hours, able to shape the world around me. I’m now back to 6-7 hours and my rhythm is out of whack, even when I can lie in, I wake too early and wake with my brain racing. My creativity is hampered a little but business needs must. For now.
Are the best dancers the ones who learn all the steps or the ones who feel the dance and know what happens next? If finding your natural voice is about breathing and about using muscles differently, then maybe finding that rhythm is about knowing your brain and body and massaging different parts back to functionality. Eat healthy, brain healthy, less sugar, more fibre, read fact, love fiction, learn the Alexander technique, write and write and write. Do a day of silence where you don’t read, don’t use a computer, turn off the phone and don’t talk. Don’t take notes. Let all the thoughts bump off each other. This is probably best done in seclusion. Einstein worked his ass off in his lab/office but that was raw manufacturing in a way, it was when he escaped from those places that the eureka moments happened. Exercising like walking or running or for Einstein, cycling, got one part of the brain to work on the mechanics of the body and then the brain went off and experimented with the data he had gathered.
If our brains are in constant data gathering mode and are also working from the hymn sheet of someone else then it’s going to be hard for us to be creative. I think everyone has the potential to be creative and to think differently and add value to things we encounter in daily life but we can only do that when we find our natural state. Reading books is bad if you are never in a state of not reading books or rather, letting the brain alone to digest things in its own peristaltic state. That goes too when you are bashing out work, creative or not. Good business ideas can possibly be cranked out; great business ideas need to be contemplated. Einstein may have cracked the nut on relativity in a flash but it took him 6 weeks to figure it out properly.
Edit: Originally written in pen on a train then typed up. Composing on computer and editing took three hours.
