Unassigned
I have a friend who is deathly afraid of losing his memory some day.
And like any good group of friends, we make sure to jokingly taunt him by reintroducing ourselves and saying, “It’s me, Lyndsay.”
But in all seriousness, somewhere along the road that is his life, he developed this fear and somewhere along that same road he heard of some ways to help your brain stay active and thus prevent memory loss: taking different and varying routes home from familiar places and learning a new language.
Basically…seeing and learning new things.
Now despite this neurotic tendency of his, I think he’s onto something.
In order to keep our brain active and in order to think more clearly, we need to change our patterns.
We need to refresh the way we do things.
And this makes a lot of sense to me. I recently got back from a business trip to Seattle where I was struck by the sites, sounds, smells, and culture of this incredible city. I sat on a dock overlooking the Puget Sound and to put it simply, felt completely refreshed.
I feel this way not only when I travel, but when I do things out of my daily routine. When I try a new food or park or nail polish. I feel this way when I surround myself with new people or set my hand to a new craft. It’s like my brain was taking a nap and then a bunch of lightning bugs came in to wake it up.
I picture the little flickering, yellow lights swaying back and forth in my brain from one section to the other, stirring and enlightening the way I think and create.
And without fail, in moments like these, I always fill up my idea notepads at rapid speeds with new ideas, thoughts, and sometimes answers.
So just like those of us working on preventing early memory loss (and I realize when I say ‘those of us,’ I really just mean my one friend…unless there are dozens of other young men in their 20s who fear this), I think we should do these things to avoid settling into a rut and getting stuck with the same view for the rest of our lives.
Because changing things up is refreshing. Like an ice cold can of Sprite straight out of the cooler.
And it’s also necessary. Not just for creatives, not just for artists, but for everyone.
If we keep doing what we’ve always done, keep looking at the same view, keep surrounding ourselves with the same people, we will see things the way we’ve always seen them.
And most of the time, all it takes is a little switch, a small shift, a different sunset, to open us up to something new and fantastic.
