Unlearn Your Lesson

Given the option, I invariably end up at the third urinal from the right on the furthest right wall of the gents’ toilets in London Waterloo railway station. Despite having done this semi-regularly for over fifteen years, it took me that whole time to gain conscious awareness of the habit.

I think about this behaviour a lot on the train home and my wife shakes her head and raises her eyebrows when it’s the first thing out of my mouth upon return from a day in the city. In isolation, it matters not. Even consciously, I’ll probably still do it next time because I always have and it’s insignificant where I empty my bladder. But it does trigger deeper introspection. How many other unconscious behaviours am I carrying out that could be challenged, or even unlearned in order to rejuvenate tired habitual echoes of what was once meaningful creativity?

We have a blackboard easel and a range of chalks in the family kitchen. Any number of us will gather around it and draw things we like, or have done. But sometimes my two-year-old daughter will start to speak a sentence, or an action and her limited vocabulary will fail to communicate the idea, at which point she grows frustrated and begins to shout noises, or sing before visibly reaching uncontainable levels of excitement. Then she’ll run to the chalkboard and using the chalk, visually communicates her ideas and feelings in a different language. It’s not that she is trying to convey a specific idea, or sentence with her energetic lines, circles, and assorted marks. She is simply externalising energy and chaotic thoughts. Only in flow states will I make marks with anything close to this abandon. Usually, this will be a part of a conscious effort to solve a client’s problem. Sometimes it is a way to get something off my chest via a personal project or standalone work of art. Very rarely is my motivation exploratory, without purpose, or to express the animalistic impulses my daughter so freely and unconditionally scrawls all over the chalkboard.

As I watch her, I already recognise consistent shapes and strokes as she unconsciously creates. Her twin brother, one minute older than her, draws in an entirely different way, slower, with more consideration. He too displays signature shapes and marks. In my own stroke of a paintbrush, or scribble of a pencil, there are reliable consistencies that make them mine. I have to make a conscious effort to avoid falling into this repetition. Like the urinal habit, it isn’t necessarily harmful, but if their walls become impenetrable, comfort zones can be cold, hostile prison cells in which we unknowingly condemn creativity to a life sentence.

This is an excerpt from The Creative Condition, due in early 2024.

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