It's a different river
On the benefits of returning to previous ideas over time
Time and place
Travel teaches you much about the effect that place has on you. Get out of your familiar locale and you see things better. Not just because they may be different, but because you are different in that place. Your senses are heightened by both the novelty and the slight unsureness that comes with a new culture or approach to how things work there.
But what I’m finding lately is that time or timing is something that matters as much as place in terms of affecting us creatively. Time, however, is more subtle. We track it less well than we think. As with memory, time distorts in ways we don’t realize even as we think we’re somehow mastering it.
A different river
When it comes to time, I have a few related pet phrases that I trot out periodically. One of my favorites comes from Heraclitus, the late 6th-century BC Greek philosopher. He’s got a whole catalog of zingers. But top of the list, to me, is this:
“You can never step into the same river twice.”
I take that to mean that the river is flowing and the same water that was there when you stepped into it one moment, is now downstream the next. Different time, different river. And really, different you.
It’s that last part that evades my attention until I confront something I barely appreciated a month ago, and now, it’s a revelation. That happens frequently with books. What was snoozefest one day is, with the passage of time, now riveting. How could I not see its value before?
Heraclitus’ river. Or at least the “different you” part of it. The book didn’t change, but I did.
In my book, The Creative Wild: Get Unstuck, Create More Adventurously, I list out a number of “tools for creating adventurously.” One of them is Re-Creation. You can think of it, if you’re a writer, as a fancy way of talking about editing. In other art forms, it’s the process of refining. But for our purposes here, Re-Creation is also the act of revisiting.
The power of revisiting
It’s returning to something that you engage with differently now than you originally did.
But life is full of old books, movies, and creative projects you’ve read or seen before. How do you know which to go back to?
Interest. It always seems to be too simplistic a response to the question of “What should I work on now?” or “Which of these many creative projects should I prioritize?” But “What interests me most right now?” has, for me and so many other creatives, been one of the surest ways to determine what to focus on. And the same applies to what to return to.
An illustration
For example, last week, before our Substack Live, I was talking to Jen Mayer about her idea for me to add a card deck to my upcoming book, Make Something Beautiful. Jen had some great suggestions which made me think more about such a product. It also reminded me of a box set of creativity-related cards produced by a friend of mine, Naomi Kinsman over at The Illumineer’s Studio. I’d gone through her box of cards and other creativity tools before and thought it was cool, but I didn’t really get into it because I had too many other things going on at the time. Then today, I returned to it and was blown away by how impressive it is.
Did I not see that before? I did. But I was stepping into a different river then. My own creative priorities and even life circumstances make me more receptive to the need for such a boxed set now. In short, I’m more interested in it now, both from a product perspective and for me personally.
Acting on what you notice
That’s the way it works. What didn’t matter before does so now in ways you can’t explain. But the secret to all of this is that, for time to do its magic, you have to pay attention. You have to not only notice the original source of inspiration enough for it to lodge in your memory. Then you also need to note those tiny nudges later that say, “Hey! Remember that thing…?” And then, you must heed such sparks and glimpses and make the effort to follow up with what your curiosity is trying to get you to notice—and use.
If you do, you can’t know ahead of time what amazing results will occur. That’s a whole different river upstream from where you’re currently standing. But one filled with incredible possibilities.