Some mornings the problem isn’t the work.

It’s everything surrounding the work. Pressing against it from all sides.

I had a morning like this recently. A grant email had arrived the night before with a deadline I hadn’t planned for. A page on my studio site still needed to go up. I’m building a table for my daughter’s wedding, a large spruce slab that needs to be designed, built, and resin applied. Her bridesmaids’ gifts need eco-dyeing once I settle on the right plants for the colors she wants. Track season has started and is taking a chunk of every afternoon. An interview project I’d taken on was costing more time than I’d expected. And the newsletter was due.

I sat down to work and instead found myself circling. Not blocked in the way we usually mean. Not afraid of the blank page. Not hearing the inner critic. Just… orbiting. Thinking about what to think about first.

I noticed something in that moment. It wasn’t any single task that was stopping me. It was being able to see all of them at once.

Last week we talked about open loops, the unfinished things running quietly in the background. This is a cousin to that, but different. Those loops were about the past, things set down and not yet resolved. This feeling was about the present. About demand. About a list that had gotten too wide to walk through.

There’s a distinction worth making, slowly.

A creative block and an attention traffic jam feel nearly the same from the inside. But they’re not the same thing.

A creative block lives in the work. Fear, self-doubt, the inner critic arriving right at the moment of beginning. We’ve talked about some of this in earlier issues.

What I was experiencing that morning was different. It wasn’t about the work at all. It was about volume. About variety. The part of the brain that manages planning and prioritizing, the part that decides what next, can genuinely fill up. When it does, decision-making doesn’t slow down gradually. It stops. Not because something is wrong with you. Because the system is full.

There’s something else worth naming here too. It’s not just the number of things. It’s the kind. A grant application, a physical build, a creative piece, and a logistical task don’t share the same cognitive space. Each one asks your brain to shift into a different mode entirely. That shifting has a cost. And the cost accumulates.

So, the paralysis that arrives when everything feels urgent isn’t weakness. It’s your nervous system telling you something honest: I cannot hold all of this and also choose. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how we’re built.

My instinct in those moments is to just start. Make a mark. Pick something up. Let motion find its own direction.

That instinct is usually right. But I’ve learned it works better with one thing in front of it.

Write the list down.

Not to organize it. Not to prioritize it. Just to move it out of my head and onto the page. The grant. The table. The newsletter. The website. The gifts. All of it, visible somewhere outside of me.

The relief this produces is almost embarrassing in how simple it is. We’re not designed to hold lists in our heads. We’re designed to act on things, not warehouse them. When I move the list out, I’m not solving anything. I’m just giving myself permission to stop carrying it.

Then I ask one question. Not what matters most. Not what I’m most behind on.

What has a clock I didn’t set?

What will get worse if I wait? What answers to someone else’s deadline, not my own sense of urgency? That goes first. Not because it’s more meaningful. Just because it’s the one thing on the list that time is already moving on without me.

That morning it was the grant application. An hour later it was done. And something in the rest of the list settled. Not disappeared.

Settled. There is a difference.

→ Read more about sustainable creative practice on the blog, Living by Making

Thomas Merton wrote about what he called the fuga mundi, the flight from the world. Not escape. Something more deliberate than that. The idea that being truly present to any one thing requires a kind of provisional absence from everything else asking for you.

As a monk He was writing about contemplative life. But I keep thinking about it in the studio. In the shop. On mornings like the one I described.

It’s not that the demands aren’t real. They are. All of them. It’s that attention given to everything is, in practice, attention given to nothing. The list on the page is one way to acknowledge everything without trying to hold all of it at once. A way of saying: I see you. I haven’t forgotten. Now let me set you down for a moment so I can actually be somewhere.

A small practice for overwhelmed mornings

When you sit down and find yourself orbiting instead of landing, try this before anything else.

Give yourself three minutes. Write down every open demand competing for your attention. Not just the creative ones. Everything. The appointment not yet made. The thing you promised. The project that has been sitting at the edge of your conscience. Get it out of your head and onto the page.

Don’t organize it. Don’t sort it. Just name it.

Then ask two things:

What has a deadline I didn’t choose?

What is one small thing my hands can do in the next ten minutes?

Not the most important thing. Not the thing that’s been waiting longest. Just something concrete. Something completable. One email sent. One first mark made. One piece cut.

The goal isn’t to clear the list. It’s just to break the orbit. Motion is easier to sustain than it is to begin. One thing is usually enough to get there.

Nothing to offer this week beyond this.

If you’re in your own version of the overlit room, I’d be glad to hear about it. Just hit reply.

———

Thank you for being here.

The days when everything is pressing don’t mean you’ve taken on too much. Sometimes they do. But often they just mean the list got visible all at once, and you’re human enough to feel the weight of it.

Writing it down is not a system. It’s not productivity advice. It’s just a small act of honesty. A way of telling yourself: I haven’t forgotten any of this. I just can’t carry all of it and also begin.

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here on the Living by Making Blog

A note about Thomas Merton and his writing

Thomas Merton writes about fuga mundi (flight from the world) most notably in "The Waters of Siloe" (1949), his history of the Cistercian order, where he explores the monastic tradition of withdrawing from the world.

He also engages with the theme extensively in "The Sign of Jonas" (1953) and "New Seeds of Contemplation" (1962), where he reflects on and eventually critiques the concept — arguing that the contemplative life isn't simply about escaping the world, but about finding God in and through it.

His thinking on fuga mundi evolved significantly over his life: his early work embraced a more dualistic flight from the world, while his later writings (especially "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander", 1966) moved toward engagement with the world rather than rejection of it.

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