You may have noticed that my week away from the blog turned into ‘the rest of the month’. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have picked up my return to blogging was scheduled for October 1st. That would be today.
I’ve enumerated my reasons on my personal blog, but suffice to say I just kind of needed a break.
I guess the same is true of most creative endeavours. Most people I know who make music for a living have times when picking up their instrument is the last thing they feel like doing – no matter how much they love playing, composing, performing and so on.
And in fact, sometimes the downtime is where the creativity comes from. People who do meditation claim (and I have no reason to doubt them) that from the silence springs the most creative and productive energies. If you don’t power down from time to time, you just kind of run out of juice.
In the business literature, there’s a metaphor about a woodsman or a lumberjack, or whatever they’re called. His tool is the saw, and you cut down trees with it. That’s it’s job. But there’s nothing dumber than the guy who won’t stop to sharpen his saw because he’s too busy cutting down trees. It’s not a bad metaphor.
So – I’m curious. What do you do to sharpen the saw? When you step away from the music (or the creative endeavour, whatever it happens to be) what do you do so you can go back to it energised and refreshed?