Sometimes what keeps you crispy also burns you out. I think about this a lot whenever I’m going through yet another newsletter or chasing another YouTube video for insights, when I’m looking for something that will help me finally get something together – be it my creative process or my ideas or sense of disorganization – and spend far more energy entertaining possible solutions than just doing something. Or, you know, resting.

For a while, I couldn’t escape the Instagram pushes for ultraproductivity. The calls for starting your day at 4am. The hand-slapping for not having the financial house in order. The workouts with all kinds of resistance band variations. It felt like I was constantly behind the ball while the person telling me what to do – often at a desk and with headphones – had all the answers. After a while, I started to realize these up-and-coming productivity experts were disciples, which begat more disciples, which beget an entire, trickle-down industry of diminishing returns. Every Starbucks I went into had one of these people. They were always on the phone. They were advising people to quit their jobs and purse their passion. And you just knew that person was going to, in fact, quit their job, buy a set of Air Pods, and set up shop in another Starbucks location. It would only be a matter of time before the head ate the tail.

Once I saw the vicious cycle of it all, I found it easier to let go. I stopped checking the emails. I went inward, reminding myself of all I had accomplished instead of all I had yet to accomplish. I recognized rest needed to truly be rest, and that playing video games or watching a movie or zoning out on Twitter did not mean I was wasting time. I was, instead, giving my body exactly what it needed.

The other thing about avoiding burnout is you gotta unplug. There is a very real thing called vampire energy. If your appliances and electronics aren’t plugged turned on or charging, they can still be drawing energy as long as they’re plugged into a wall outlet. Sometimes we think we’ve actually unplugged – we’ve put our phone on a counter face down, we’ve turned off the TV – but it’s still plugged into the system that wears you out, and it still finds a way to utterly exhaust you. It’s like a subscription service offering a free trial – they just want you to plug in your credit card, hoping you’ll forget to cancel as they bill you a little bit of money each month. The goal is for it to seem a small enough cost you don’t do the work to cancel. But it still adds up over time.

I still feel the pangs of not doing enough. I still wonder if I’m letting things pass me by. But it isn’t met with a deep dive into the tail-eating world of hyperproductivity. Instead, I look for ways to simplify my life further. To say ‘No’. To declutter. To eliminate down to the essence.

The real sparks come when you ride the wave of creativity. When you know there will be moments where you’re stuck and unsure where to go next and need to go into a more idle mode, busying yourself with random tasks such as taking a shower, going for a walk, or driving around the neighborhood. When you know the inkling of an idea comes to you at a very inconvenient time – usually while you’re sleeping or you got a child restless in your arms – and you gotta figure out where you’ll put it; in a Note on your phone, in the margins of a newsletter, on a soon-to-be-ripped napkin. When you know there’s a time to buckle down and commit to the keyboard, the paper, the whatever it is that allows your brain to meet execution. And then you ride the wave some more. Over and over again.

I spent so much of my life blocking off time for writing. “I’ll write all morning,” I’d say. “I’ll write until I got 20 pages down,” I’d challenge. I did all of these things, over and over again, with very little to show for it. Instead, I’d take detours into my email, checking off all these newsletters I was behind on. I’d get sucked into the internet browser and down another rabbit hole. I would do everything but the thing I set out to do. Which only compounded the frustration.

It wasn’t until I understood my brain was a lightbulb, sometimes dormant, sometimes aspark, riding a wave I had no weather report for. There was no way to predict when things would show up. There was only accepting it would be a ride worth being patient for.

Can you connect four emotions?

So much of the writing process can feel technical. Certain things need to happen by certain pages or certain points in the story. But when you go too far in the direction, you lose what makes it last: the emotion of it all. I become a far better, more engaging writer when I track the emotions of my stories. When I really think about what each character is feeling from scene to scene. It makes it more accessible for an actor to later to do something with it. It makes it easier for a reader to fall into the story and get comfortable. It makes the world go round.

When I see the word SPLAT, I think of those Nickelodeon slime machines. The ones primed and ready to be sprung on any unsuspecting celebrity at the annual Kids’ Choice Awards? The kind boldly trying to make a technologically-boosted comeback with the…NFL? Yes, that did happen.

But the beauty of the dictionary is how you can start with one word you think you know and stumble upon a definition you’d never heard of. Case in point: a splat is also “a broad, flat piece of wood, either pierced or solid, forming the center upright part of a chair back…” The more you know, I guess.

I added the hourglasses within them because it’s a reminder as much to me as to anyone: time in the chair is where the good things happen. The brainstorming and the idle daydreaming is crucial, yes. But ideas aren’t much of anything without a little bit of execution, and that’s where the splat, the space where you press your back into when you’re especially feeling your way through a piece, really does its job.

Sometimes it feels like there’s very little magic in the world. I think a lot about that line in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End when Barbossa says, “The world used to be a bigger place,” and Jack Sparrow responds with, “The world’s still the same. There’s just…less in it.” This goes hand in hand with Hellboy II when Prince Nuada says, “We die…and the world will be poorer for it.” They’re both getting at the same thing: gone are the pirates and the fairies and the elves, and in its place is a lack of imagination and creativity. There’s less problem-solving because there’s an app for everything. There’s less reading because our brains are too shorted to stay focused. There’s less art given the space to create any sense of wonder because it’s all fed through the meat grinder of ‘content’. The world hasn’t changed size. But sometimes it certainly feels like there’s less in it.

Which brings me to the Summer of 2019. My wife and I tip-toe down creaky wooden stairs into a New Zealand glow-worm cave. As we become immersed in the darkness, a light glows to our right, close to the ground. There lays a giant bone, like a femur from a large animal. We’ve just been told how animals would sometimes unknowingly sink through the grass above us and fall into the caves, their lonely bodies wasting to bones. The most common victim of this disappearing spell: cows. But this bone? This is not a cow, they explain. This giant bone comes from a Moa, one of nine kinds of flightless New Zealand birds. The largest of these birds grew to be 12 feet tall and 540 pounds. In other words: absolutely terrifying.

It’s very possible they were just joking with us ignorant tourists. Moas have been extinct for over 6 centuries, after all. But I chose to believe. It was far more interesting to do so. It made the world feel a little bigger, like it still retained just a little bit more magic.

Something pretty damn magical happened in 1973, when Action Comics’ Issue #425 had Superman fighting a Flying Moa. You did not misread that. A. Flying. Moa. The story, as it turns out, is about a hunter who unknowingly kills the last Moa on earth. Regretting his actions, he makes a commitment to finding a Moa egg. Upon finding one, he doesn’t seem to realize that the egg – engulfed in flames – may be superpowered and brings it back to Metropolis to help create more Moas. The hunter is being interviewed by none other than Clark Kent when the egg hatches and out comes a flying, screeching Moa. It’s wild. The sweet thing about this is that the Moa has no intentions of killing or hurting anyone – it just wanted to go home. So Superman does the Superman thing and brings him all the way back to New Zealand where he sets up a Moa reserve. The fact we haven’t heard about this in the years since the issue tells me it probably didn’t last very long. But at least the dude tried!

I find little bits of bizarre comics trivia like this rather inspiring. It’s a window into a time when, yes, they were probably really grasping for narrative straws in the face of having to produce so many issues in such a short period of time. But the focus on quantity over quality meant some really crazy, even magical ideas could squeak through. A little bit of magic could sneak in through the door and make the world, once again, feel a little bigger.