Creative laziness – should we foster it or manage it?

What we call “creative laziness” is actually stillness amid the chaos of life. If activities (or more accurately routine activities) are the pillars and the walls, then creative laziness is the empty space of the rooms, where we reside. Creativity is often shrouded in mysteries. Many scientific studies have been conducted to uncover what propel the vivid imagination of a painter or brilliant “flow state” of an impromptu rap artist or a jazz soloist when they improvise. As a result, we know more about the biological workings of the human brain but we are far from fully understanding it. As science continues to shed new light on the mechanisms of creativity, we realise that we are intuitively aware of these on a humanistic level. We may not have known that reducing “activation of the Executive Attention Network....and increas[ing] activation of the Imagination and Salience Networks” lead your brain to respond more creatively (Scott Kaufman, blogs.scientificamerica.com), but we know that when we take those long restless walks, grumpily stare out of the window, get up suddenly at night and try to remember an idea, we are actually communicating with our sub-conscious. When Al Mahmud wrote that “poet's laziness” is necessary for every poet to compose noteworthy poetry, he was referring to this vacant state where conscious and unconscious thoughts swirl around and bump into each other. The creative person tries to grasp at these and harness some of them. This is probably why “sleeping on it” has been recommended by so many people to allow a creative product to take shape in our heads. In a recent interview Noam Chomsky was asked if consciousness baffles him. He said that consciousness is very simple but pre-consciousness is very hard to explain (i.e. how things that don't need specific attention are decided in our brain). This, of course, opens up all sorts of philosophical conundrum about free will and predestination. But that is a different story. Whether science can explain it fully or not the thing we do understand intuitively is that our minds are more than the sum of us. It knows things we don't. That is why the “eureka” moment happened for Archimedes of Syracuse in a stupor. That is how we experienced “eureka” moments in our lives too. Our eurekas may not have changed the course of the knowledge of physics, but it was the same process. So, the “creative laziness” or more appropriately the opportunity to be idle creates the fertile ground for our minds to produce something new. The amount and quality of our thinking determines what the fertile ground will finally yield. Even though the cryptic process of the subconscious requires idleness, harnessing the awesome power of our minds actually takes practice. When asked about her creative process the Welsh national poet Gwyneth Lewis said that she finds it unreliable to wait for inspiration to come. Lewis said that inspiration sometimes come to you inexplicably and you cannot replicate that on demand. She said that she routinely sits down every morning and forces herself to write. John Cleese, famous comedy scriptwriter and performer, also recommended the same strategy. Cleese said that you must put aside a certain time of the day to isolate yourself so that you can work on your ideas. You will have to fight yourself to shape those ideas into meaningful expressions that are artistically satisfying. “I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble,” said Agatha Christie. The happy marriage between the solace of idleness and proactive manipulation of thoughts is what makes great creative works possible. And that is the balance creative people must strive for.