What slow creativity can do for you
We seem to have become rather obsessed with speed.
Make it. Finish it. Post it. Move on. There is always another deadline, another message, another small red notification demanding attention. Even creativity, which you might have thought would be allowed to take its time, can begin to feel like another task to be completed. The trouble is that creativity doesn't always respond well to being hurried. When we're working quickly, we tend to reach for what we already know: the familiar colour, the reliable technique, the idea that worked last time. It's efficient, certainly, but efficiency isn't necessarily where the interesting work happens.
The work that surprises us tends to arrive when there is room to experiment, get something wrong, abandon the sensible idea and follow the slightly peculiar one instead. It might appear while something is drying, on a walk after lunch, or late in the afternoon when you've stopped trying quite so hard. This can look suspiciously like doing nothing. It isn't. There is good reason why ideas often appear when our attention is elsewhere. When we're walking, daydreaming or simply staring out of a window, the brain has an opportunity to make connections that are harder to find when we're concentrating intensely on a particular task. The problem is that we've become very good at filling those gaps. We check our phones while waiting for the kettle. Answer emails over lunch. Listen to something while walking. There is always one more useful thing we could be doing.
And after a while, all that usefulness can become exhausting.
Slowing down gives both the mind and the body a chance to change gear. Without the usual stream of small demands, we begin to notice things again. We concentrate for longer. We become curious rather than hurried. The pressure to produce something good begins to fade and, rather wonderfully, making things can become enjoyable again. It doesn't necessarily happen immediately. It can take a day or two to stop mentally checking the inbox, remembering things that need doing and wondering what might be happening elsewhere. Then, gradually, the noise recedes. This is part of what a retreat at Les Soeurs Anglaises offers: not an instruction to relax or an obligation to be creative, but simply the circumstances in which both have a chance to happen. Time to work, certainly, but also time to eat, talk, walk, swim, read, wander around the garden or do very little at all.
Because slow creativity isn't really about doing less. It's about having enough space to become absorbed in something again, and discovering what happens when, for a little while, you stop rushing towards the next thing.