When I see beautiful places,the stories start talking…
Taking in the tea trails, Sri Lanka
Routine is a wonderful thing, but breaking routine is absolutely delightful.
I haven’t been working on my WIP last month and it felt surprisingly fantastic. Instead, I went travelling around beautiful and isolated parts of Sri Lanka last month and it got me thinking about the concept of breaking routine and how it related to my own writing process.
Writing if you aren’t careful can drain and leech everything you have. For a while that’s how my writing life felt to me and then I realized something during my month of uninhibited exploring – One MUST fill the creative well. Not just for the sake of your ‘art’ but for you. In my case, the act of simply sitting at my desk and working through my revision edits was just not enough to fuel me to the end.
Was I still excited about my story?
Yes.
Could I work on it?
No.
I felt like I was dying from exhaustion and my muse needed CPR. Something needed to change if I wanted to see this WIP complete.
So I broke routine.
Such beautiful color ..
I took up photography and saw life through a different lens.
I wrote poetry and stretched my mind to see words differently.
I bonded with beautiful people despite the language barrier.
All in all, I was filling my body and soul with good things.
Falling in love with this sari a little bit
Travelling is a great passion of mine and every trip I learn something new about myself and the world. I was born in Sri Lanka, and despite visiting previously, this is the first time I left the country with a strong connection to my own sense of identity. For the first time in my life I saw the way a sari draped around a woman’s body absolutely beautiful! Here I was spending my youth avoiding looking ‘ethERnic’ at all cost. What was wrong with me?
You don’t need to go overseas to break routine to fill the well and nourish yourself – but you do need to be exposed to new things.
It is so easy to get caught up in a routine that stunts growth – so if you take anything from this post I hope you find a way to break routine a little bit every day. It doesn’t matter if you work or if you study or if you are based at home – there is something you can do to shake things up a bit and experience something new.
Although the world is getting smaller, there is just so many things to see!
Just go outside your front door 🙂
How do you break routine a little bit everyday?
Love and light,
Anushka xx
Finding My Creature 