I’ve had a back and forth relationship with writing morning pages. If you’re not familiar, Morning Pages refers to the writing practice of, every morning, writing three (ish) pages of whatever comes to mind. Musings, stories, diary-style chronicling events—it doesn’t matter what it is. It can be profound, silly, boring—the quality doesn’t matter that much either. The point is to practice writing.

Two summers ago, in California, I was relentless with my morning pages. I consistently wrote three whole pages in my journal, even when I didn’t feel like it. (Which was most of the time! Who feels like writing a whole bunch when you’re sleepy!) 

In my quiet mornings this past fall and winter, I’ve been attempting to write morning pages again, even if it’s just a few lines in my journal. This morning, as I sat with my coffee, I went through the internal “I don’t feel like cracking my journal but I really should” conversation with myself, and realized part of the reason was because I didn’t know what to write. 

And I didn’t know what to write because I couldn’t remember the last Actual Thought that I had?!

As I opened my journal, though, I realized there WERE thoughts floating around in my head. But in my groggy morning state, it sounded infinitely easier to stuff them down and scroll through other people’s thoughts, instead.

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My husband and I are currently wrestling through some big questions about life and vocation, place and calling. We’ve also been feeling like we’re running the rat race that we always wanted to avoid. We’ve been working to pay bills, longing for evenings and weekends, stressed. (Absolutely, positively not how we want to spend our lives.)

As we talked through how to NOT live this way, and make actual progress with thinking through Big Questions, one of the main things we decided to do was attempt to create brain space. It doesn’t cost money. It doesn’t add to our plates. But we need more breathing room in our minds.

This is accidentally becoming a blog post about getting off your phone, but it will not surprise you to learn that the way we decided to do this was to put our phones away in the evenings. We want space to read and think (and be aware of our own thoughts) instead of just scrolling through articles and tidbits of information (that are enormously helpful sometimes! But also not the only place to find answers!), hoping to find something that will spark a thought.

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I’m saying all of this because if you own an online business, or are the type of person who reads blogs like this, you likely are always wanting to nurture creativity. Whether you write, take photos, or create content in order to generate leads for your business, with the goal of writing a book someday, or just because you love it, you can’t do it based only on other people’s ideas. 

(Disclaimer: I say that knowing that none of us are purely original. In some ways, everything we do is based on something we read, watched, or saw from someone else. I do believe in “stealing like an artist.”)

But. What if the words, film, or painting that you are most intended to make, the thing that could change your trajectory or your perspective, or the path or thinking of someone else—is waiting for you to have a moment’s quiet to actually realize it is there?

Don’t stop taking in quality words and art and experiences. Beauty is generative.

And also, don’t get so full of the thoughts and creations of other people that your own get lost in the noise. 

(Maybe start by putting away your phone.)