Walking and Creativity
Walking whipped up a storm of creativity skirting the edges of lunacy. Ravenous cravings for shine and sparkle, texture and pattern, escaped from beneath a measured and practiced neutrality, and demanded expression. After years of rarely remembering my dreams, I woke up from breathtaking adventures frequently. Everything my eyes landed on shimmered like sunlight off fresh snow. A dike had broken in the best way.
Stanford conducted a study in 2014 confirming what many have known in their bones for centuries, that walking boosts creativity. Their findings concluded that creativity can by increased by up to 60% during a given walk and “shortly thereafter. Define “shortly”.
I invited my friend Jo to come over and make luminaries from paper-mâché, using inflated balloons as forms. One of the parents in Miles’ kindergarten class had done this with a room full of energetic five-year-olds. Miles’ creation from that day still sits on his dresser two decades later. Jo and I quickly discovered that if we turned the spheres open-side-down, we could make hot air balloons; over the course of several daylong visits, we made a fleet of dozens of them in an array of designs, sizes, and colors, and lined the insides of each with tiny string lights.
The messes we cleaned up at the end of each session were every bit as alluring as the aircrafts themselves: bits of handmade papers, colored threads, stray stars, metal rivets, tissue paper, glitter dust. Extension cords for glue guns and drills criss-crossed our backyards, where drying balloons hung from every tree branch, as we alternated houses, trying not to overwhelm our respective families. Jo spent hours crocheting metallic gold thread into strands that looked like metal chains, which we used to suspend the baskets from some of the hot air balloons.
One evening, we went out to West Cliff Drive, hung the balloons up on the branches of a tree and put up a sign saying: “Hot Air Balloons. Free.” Two ten-year-old girls oohed and aahed and took their time making their selections as their mothers stood by patiently. A contractor with his big dog in tow thoughtfully selected a blue hot air balloon, which he planned to hang on his front porch to compliment the color of his house; a massage therapist out for a stroll looked briefly at the sign and kept going, but turned back and asked us, “Are they for anyone?” Jo replied, “take your pick.” A shy young couple headed straight for a black one with shiny stars and moons and stood there smiling shyly. “It’s yours” I said, they took it by its metal “S” hook and walked away without a word.
Free hot air balloons on West Cliff Drive
