On boredom, and the creative power behind it

I realize now I didn’t know fullness before I started walking like this. The walk taught me fullness. It’s good like that, the walk. Walking. I’ve now got hundreds of “max full” days under my belt. You carry the feeling of those days back to your everyday life. You now have an archetype for a fully “used up” day. That’s a powerful thing, and one that can’t be learned through description alone. It must be felt in the bones after mile twenty, on the tenth day of doing twenty miles, on the tenth day of banging out a text, collimating the experience of connecting with strangers, feeling the sonder of those you pass, melding the day into words, pairing those words with images, creating a complete “object” or piece as it were. And then pushing it out into the world (the publishing at the end of the day creates a kind of stakes that I find is critical to eking out that last drop of fullness).

Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking ‹ Literary Hub

https://lithub.com/craig-mod-on-the-creative-power-of-walking

This resonated. Melancholy was a powerful catalyst of creativity for me. Some of my most prolific periods of creative thinking came from being sad and lonely. I've never attempted to recreate that part of my life for the fear of slipping down scary tunnels.

However, of late, I've been able to recreate them when I am working out. It's a point of pushing the body to its edges and when I can will up the power to create a dopamine scarcity, like Craig Mod says, the brain fills that in with thoughts, and philosophy and reflection.