The drawing board

Many of my most exciting moments and most challenging moments happened at the same place: the drawing board.

For me, this is a literal drawing table here in the DFOS studio. As I've written about before, I use giant roles of white butcher paper that I unroll and fill with ideas and sketches as I work through a project.

I've spent little time at the scroll the past couple of months. Things have been busy and in execution mode focused on fulfilling the work in front of me rather than asking bigger professional questions.

That felt right. I was following through, fulfilling promises, doing the harder work of manifesting the ideas that the scroll makes so fun to imagine.

During the summer months while the scroll sat dormant I'd ask myself whether I needed to spend time there. I often find it cathartic and a space for breakthroughs. But my gut never responded to this invitation. There was too much to do.

But yesterday it did. In the midst of churning through a bunch of Things That Needed To Get Done, I felt an itch to walk over to the scroll. I spent ten minutes sketching a kind of Captain's Log of where things were at that moment.

Today I felt compelled to do the same.

From these two little moments — probably 45 minutes in all — I can already feel the aperture widening. Still seeing the things immediately in front of me, but inviting a wider spectrum of thinking.

I can see why I've been anxious to do this. It doesn't create comfort. It pushes you into places you weren't prepared to go. What do you do with that?

In the liner notes of a recent reissue of the Alice Coltrane album "A Monastic Trio," released a year after John Coltrane's death, Alice says her late husband was seeking in his music a way of expressing the universal harmony and richness of God, in whatever form that was for him or you.

John would encourage Alice to play this way. Alice remembers John putting it in a striking phrase: "play the whole chord." Not just the middle part everyone plays. See the full expanse of how the chord can be played. Explore that. Make that the reason underneath it all.

This is what opens up when we shift gears and create space. This is what vacations do for us (mine was lovely, hope yours was too). Going to the drawing board — or any blank piece of paper — can do it too.