くうはく + ほこう + かけら = そうぞう
blank space + walking + fragments = creation
It was 2:15 p.m. on a Thursday. The kind of afternoon where the sunlight hits the pavement at a slant, making the city look like a movie set that everyone has abandoned for lunch.
I was walking nowhere in particular. I was thinking about the question a young writer had asked me: “How do you force yourself to be creative?”
I wanted to tell him: “You don’t. If you force it, you break it.”
Creativity isn’t a factory. It’s a foraging mission. It’s the act of walking through the world with your pockets open, waiting for the universe to drop small, shiny things inside.
1. The Art of the Empty Vessel (Relaxation)
Most people try to be creative by tightening their grip. They stare at the screen. They drink too much coffee. They try to squeeze a diamond out of a piece of coal with their bare hands.
But I have learned that ideas are like stray cats. If you chase them, they will run under a parked car and hiss at you.
To catch them, you have to do the opposite. You have to sit on the porch and pretend you are sleeping.
- The looseness: I am most creative when I am doing absolutely nothing of value. When I am washing a dish. When I am staring at a cloud that looks like a bruised peach.
- The permeability: You have to be relaxed enough to be permeable. If you are stressed, you are a stone wall. If you are relaxed, you are a screen door. The wind blows through you, and sometimes, the wind carries a seed.
2. The Kinetic Engine (The Walk)
I don’t trust any thought I have while sitting down.
The legs are the pistons of the imagination. There is a specific rhythm to walking—left foot, right foot, breath, breath—that hypnotizes the logical part of the brain. It puts the “Manager” to sleep so the “Dreamer” can sneak out the back door.
I walk to forget, not to think.
I walk until the noise of my own ego quiets down. And in that silence, strange things start to bubble up. A sentence. A melody. A solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. The rhythm of the feet becomes the rhythm of the work.
3. The Thief of Small Things (The Surroundings)
But you cannot create from nothing. You need raw materials.
I am not a genius. I am a thief.
I surround myself with people, not to talk to them, but to harvest them. I take small scraps of their existence and glue them into my own notebook.
- The laugh: I once heard a woman laugh in a bakery. It was a sharp, jagged laugh, like breaking glass. I stole it. I gave it to a character three years later.
- The posture: I saw an old man waiting for a bus, standing with a dignity that broke my heart. I stole his spine. I put it in a story about a retired soldier.
- The fragment: I hear a snippet of conversation: “He smells like rain and old newspapers.” I steal the phrasing.
I don’t take their whole lives. I just take the shavings. The button off a coat. The specific way they hold a cigarette. The silence they leave behind when they walk out of a room.
The Collage of the Soul
I stopped walking. I was standing in front of a park where children were playing on a jungle gym.
I realized that creativity is just a collage.
It is the act of taking the relaxation of a Tuesday afternoon, the rhythm of a long walk, and the stolen fragments of a hundred strangers, and arranging them into a pattern that looks like Truth.
You don’t have to be brilliant. You just have to be:
- Loose enough to let the world in.
- Moving enough to keep the blood flowing.
- Observant enough to pick up the pieces others drop.
I reached into my pocket. There was nothing there but a receipt and a smooth stone I had picked up earlier.
It was enough. It was the beginning of a story.
life 