Offices versus Creativity

I don't know if this is just me, or if it is common experience:

To get serious work done, I need to be out of my office.

For serious writing or lecture prep, I have to hit the Starbucks, or the Rocket Bakery, or simply go driving somewhere -- in other words, I have to get out of my office before the juices can flow.

Even as I write this a colleague emails me an interesting article. After printing it out, my knee-jerk response was: "I need to go out for lunch so I can read this ..."

And I usually don't go out for lunch.

At home it's the same thing: serious reading takes place on my recliner; serious writing at the dining room table. None of it in my home office.

As for art work, absolutely no artwork is ever done in my office. (Well, once. This was done in my office, drawn on the back of a note card; and it is the most-visited blog I ever posted. So there's always an exception).

But the minute I sit down in any place called "my office," doing anything other than surfing the internet -- or snacking -- is a major stretch.

Or blogging. That can be done in my office.

Or goofing off: yesterday I had to delete a computer scrabble game off of my home office computer just so it wouldn't be the main attraction. It was a major decision. Because: what else would I do??? I would be faced with the stark whiteness of the WORD document on the screen in front of me, with no escape -- and no ideas what to write. But I took the plunge anyway.

For me it raises questions about names and roles and creativity; about functions we associate with physical spaces verses what we actually do in those spaces.

We humans are limited creatures, and every culture develops special ways to limit itself. In our culture, "going to the office" is a well-accepted limitation. And like any limitation, it comes with expectations. When you go to the office, that's when you're supposed to "work."

"Work." This is another limitation.

And so there are many businesses that thrive off of the limitations of "office." Like all the clothing stores to help you "dress up for work." But I don't recall the last time I produced anything worthwhile dressed up in my office best.

Like Office Depot. This is where you purchase things for your office; all sorts of things from pencils and pens to computers and hard drives to office furniture.

Office furniture.

Nothing can be more stifling to the creative imagination than having to create surrounded by office furniture.

Logos2Go

Mark 2.23-28 One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”