The Benefits of Letting Things Percolate

This blog has taken an age to write.  Not because I’ve been tinkering with it and endlessly editing.  I apologise, dear reader, as I’m too imperfect and impatient to do such things.

I’ve simply been avoiding sitting down and doing it.  A couple of weeks ago I had a gorgeously sunny holiday in Crete for a week.  It was a marvellous refresh as, for a few weeks prior, I’d been languishing a little.  Work was still happening and I was still putting effort in where it was needed, but my drive to create new exciting things went on holiday weeks before I did.

Now I’m back with renewed oomph (a lot more to come on that soon), but on the flipside of the slight languish mode is that now I’m quite time poor.  The routine has shifted as it’s the holidays, with two teens in the house with a different set of demands and schedules to what is usual.

The day before I intend to publish this, here I am finally pulling my thoughts together into this blog for you.  It’s somewhat ironic that it’s taken me over 6 weeks to write something about percolation!

What this stretched out timetable has taught me is that there is a distinct difference between percolation and just not doing the thing.  

Pre-holiday, my taking the foot off the pedal and slowing a little was intentional.  I could see an opportunity to do it and, for the first time possibly ever in my career, I chose to ease off for a while.  I didn’t intend for it to go on for so long.  It was about six weeks in total.  The first few were great.  I often say, space is where the magic happens, and that’s what those initial weeks gave me.  

My creativity went into overdrive and I was so full of ideas and desires to push things in new creative ways.  Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, things started to shift.  The desire reduced, the ideas were less frequent and it started to feel like I was wading through mud rather than skipping along with the creative joy I had only a matter of days earlier.

For three or so weeks, I was percolating like mad.  Taking ideas and early-days projects and throwing them around in my head, persistently and consistently questioning and allowing them to evolve at their own pace.  I really love ideation and new starts, so this was a blissful phase for me.

Then as the shift occurred, the percolation dried up and stagnation took hold.  Yuck!  By the time I was boarding the plane to Greece, I was truly fed up with going slower; it was no longer serving me at all.  

Thankfully, holidays make me wonderfully reflective and so the mind percolator ground back into movement again.  Some of the days I woke early, crept out onto the balcony and journalled whilst glancing up frequently to adore the sea view.  One day I even got up and watched the sunrise, which felt incredibly special.  I then finally made it to the daily 7am yoga class down on the grass by the sea… sounds blissful right?  Only the yoga teacher was a rather terrifying person who counted to 30 loudly whilst we held each pose and was vocally unimpressed with my lack of upper body strength!  Not very blissful.

Anyway, I digress.  

To percolate is a useful concept which works even better when paired with lashings of self-compassion and a wise acknowledgement that I don’t have to be consciously working on a project all the time.  Sometimes, allowing an idea or piece of work to percolate in the back of my mind still achieves (sometimes remarkable) progress.

We have to work against the productivity obsession that capitalism has created though.  Percolation, from the outside, doesn’t look like much is happening.  But anyone who has great ideas in the shower/bath or out on a walk, knows that this gentle mulling over moves things forward far more effectively than if we tried to visibly work at pace all the time.

It is easy to underestimate the power of our subconscious mind to sort things out and forge new connections whilst our conscious is busy working on other things.  I see it as a bit like a Newton’s Cradle - I consciously set the balls off swinging and clicking against each other and then step back and allow that momentum to continue without driving the thought process and demanding a product or resolution quickly.  That is where my best ideas evolve.

It’s not a neat process: far from it, it’s quite messy, uncertain and unpredictable.  But it is in the dirty, dark forge of creativity where we can be alchemists and turn base metal into gold.