Creative Flow Takes You off the Clock—into the Infinite

I wrote this letter to a colleague who dedicated years to a novel and revised relentlessly before securing an agent. It was not easy. When you chase something meaningful while navigating daily existence, you feel time’s tick. Distractions disrupt and you worry about what’s lost.

Yet there are moments when we slip wholly into creative flow . . . whether writing, running, painting, baking, gardening, composing . . . that frees us to step out of time, out of preoccupation with the past and future, to connect with something infinite.

My dear friend,

Why does one semester feel like an eternity to a freshman in college, yet a week seems like an instant once you reach middle age?

We measure time in intervals. You said you mark time every Thursday. I mark it when the sun slips down on Sunday afternoon, knowing I’ll be in work mode 12 hours later.

You may remember Thoreau’s poetic words: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

What matters? Catching a fish or sitting with water rippling, wind stirring, clouds floating past?

My father was a doer, a project manager’s dream employee. Efficiency and productivity! If tasked with catching a mess of fish for supper, he’d line up five rods on the dock and reel in one catfish after another. An hour or two later, he’d clean his catch with the sure strokes of a surgeon.

In thrall to Walden themes in high school, I raised an eyebrow and thought, “Well, Dad, you’re not exactly leading ‘a life of quiet desperation’ in your busyness, but did you miss the moment to ‘drink in’ eternity?”

Nothing like a 15-year-old wiseass.

I wised up a few years later on realizing that, given his schedule, my dad made appointments to take in “forever” moments. On days off, he’d disappear for hours in his beaten up fishing boat, trolling sloughs and hideaways before dropping anchor to sit in solitude, gently rocked by the current.

Like fishing, the act of creating takes us out of time. What drives us? The story seeking form and release.

With every pass through your manuscript, you take a deeper dive. That is the beauty of your inner working—that oscillation between the human who mines complex emotions and the analyst who refines the text.

Is all of this a quiet, orderly process? Not necessarily. Sometimes I feel an internal disruption coming, something working itself out. And I must yield to this struggle for the right words, to understand what’s emerging—and myself.

As a child, I was drawn to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel until dawn (Genesis 32: 22-32).

²⁴ So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. ²⁵ When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. ²⁶Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

²⁷ The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

²⁸ Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Wrestling with words—and feeling humanness to the core—can feel like a long night of wounding and humbling and transformation. Something comes out of it. A knowing that time cannot take away.

If given the compulsion to wrestle with words, you have received a blessing. It’s one thing to see the potential of a story, like Michelangelo recognizing a figure in a marble chunk. It’s another to toil for its release.

In a dream, God allowed Jacob to see the doorway to heaven, angels ascending and descending a ladder. Do we glimpse eternity when the idea strikes, that lightning moment when a tale—with roots in ancestors’ stories and archetypal myths—connects us to billions of humans, past and present?

We’ll never know the precise moment of our death. But in the process of creative flow—whether experienced like a creek murmuring or a river running wild—we are capable of exquisite moments that take us out of time and into something greater.

A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith, Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.

If you have a friend who might enjoy these stories, freely given, please share. Many thanks for reading!