After You Hit the Wall

Creativity as a way to get started again

We’ve all probably heard Mike Tyson’s theory on plans and what happens to them.

There are going to be periods in your work life that are disrupted by realities beyond the office or the inbox. When your real life gets as blurry as your zoom background and it’s hard to pretend everything is OK, that Powerpoint you’re working seems a lot less urgent.

Work motivation goes away, so you try to fake it. But, you realize at some point you’re just going through the motions. It’s act, like an absurd kabuki where the company goals seemingly matter.

But the life stuff? Kids having hard times, relationship stress, life or death health issues, physical pain, caring for parents who are aging. That shit is real. Throw in a pandemic and some geopolitical catastrophes and it all gets pretty heavy, quick.

I’m coming out of an especially intense period of life stuff. The specifics don’t matter, but you probably have some of the same sorts of stresses. They would sound familiar to any of us who have parents, kids, siblings and live in America during “these times”.  Stretched over 10 years, no big deal. For me, they all came together in a tight 2 year window.

The normal American way of dealing with it all is to just “keep on keeping on”, trying to manage, like we’re on a set of tracks.  You find ways to cope, you try the life hacks, you shut out the emotions, focus on execution. You double down and work even harder.  It can work until it doesn’t.

If you’re lucky, there’s no permanent damage from the hard part. And hopefully your coping mechanisms, the ones that got you this far, are mostly neutral and don’t make your life unmanageable.

Endurance athletes talk about the point in the event where, after hours of sustained physical and mental and emotional performance, they break. They “hit the wall”, and their commitment goes away. They’ve lost the focus, the edge, and, for a second, the willingness to endure.

The hard part of those endurance events is never the actual physical part. It isn’t running a marathon; You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It isn’t staying in the saddle when you’re riding 100 miles; You just keep pedaling. The hard part is continuing after you’ve cracked.

Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you’ve hit the wall, though.  Eventually, we all stop sometimes. There will be a time when we all say, “Oh, screw it, I’m done”. You have to be honest that it’s time to reboot, to get up start again, to recommit.

This isn’t the first time for me. I’ve had to reboot a couple times in the past, but there’s no real guidebook for getting yourself moving again after you’ve gone through a rough patch. I also know how lucky I am, overall. I’ve got everything I need and it’s easily accessible. It’s just going to take some work.

My way through it this time will be through creativity.  Taking photos, playing music, making strategies with colleagues, working out new ideas. Developing new recipes. It’s time to make, to generate, to build. Maybe I can write my way out of this period?

Creating is an act of defiance, a reminder of the power we all have in us to leave it better than we found it. It’s an explicit commitment to work against the things that slow us all down, the decay, the regression to the mean. It’s proof that we’re moving through and beyond those things that try to hold us back.  It’s a way to literally begin again and try to avoid the next wall.