Unlike the Kid, who immediately plugged in her headphones and put some video on in the background to “help her focus” as she wrote her essay about xenomorphs and horror science fiction, I usually find I’m the kind of guy who needs as few distractions as possible to get shit done.

Neither of us are wrong.

Silence has many meanings, and maybe for you silence is as much about using blaring heavy metal thrasher tunes to silence the inner critic that keeps you from writing. Maybe solitude for you is the negative space of anonymity left behind by a corner table in a crowded cafe. Maybe the conditions that help you find your voice are nothing like mine, or anyone else’s and it would make anyone you explained it to cringe at the very thought.

The space to create is personal, deep, and often ineffable.

In the right space no one can hear you scream—or write or yearn for clarity or connect the dots on some great abiding inspiration. Either way, under the category of Space & Silence I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I read about it.^[1] I downloaded apps. I set up a space in my home and (since it was summer) I found quite places in the park to sit and find focus.

My conclusion was not that meditation didn’t work, but rather that I had already been meditating: I had been finding mindfulness on the running trail during solo runs. So, I deleted the apps and stashed my pillow and put my sneakers back on.

The other takeaway lesson was that meditative mindfulness is critical for my creative process. Long runs—which works for me, by the way, and everyone needs to find their own effective source of clarity—emptied my brain and allowed the ideas to come out and play.

I am not a meditation expert, but I have done both a lot of meditative running and creative ideation. Clearing the mind—whether by sitting quietly listening to chants or going for a long drive or sinking into the warmth of the sun on a beach or putting on a pair of trail shoes and snaking through the woods at speed—seems to be a critical piece of many people’s creative process. Find yours.

I spent some reward points and redeemed myself a pair of those new wireless earphones from that fruit company we all love so much. They are the flagship model, too. The stupidly expensive ones for which I never would have paid real money.

They have me thinking this morning about distraction and the value of being able to focus.

There are big distractions, huge things that don’t even allow us the freedom of mind to sit down at a keyboard. And there are small distractions, the kind of thing where you are perched ready to work and… the phone rings… or someone decides to have a business meeting about budget allocations at the table three feet away from where you are trying to write paranormal creative science fiction.

It’s tough to be choosy about your workspace, even when you seem to be in full control of it.

I have been dabbling in the effectiveness of the noise cancellation features of my new headphones even this morning as I write this. Adding some soft music over the full-on quiet mode has allowed me to focus and pull out of the distractions of what could have been a derailing working environment in a noisier-than-usual cafe I frequent to write in.

Distraction busted.

This is not a product endorsement. There are multiple brands and styles of noise cancelling technology, and that might not even be your small distraction du jour, nor the path to a particular solution. But all this is to say that sometimes there is a tool to help you focus, and you don’t even realize it was a distraction until you suddenly have a bit of technology to remove it.