Empirical evidence has shown me that certain changes to my physical body impact my mental, emotional, and spiritual health, too. Losing weight, increasing muscle mass, and improving cardio-vascular fitness leads to finding calm, balance, and contentment more easily. Eating healthier helps me feel clearer and better connected to my inner being. Every time I’ve taken such steps, though the initial action might be blah, the long-term impact has always been worthwhile.
Connecting physical health to mental, emotional, and spiritual health is easy to do. After all, everything about this is about me, my body, my head, heart, and soul. All four elements of my health, wellness, and wellbeing are utterly, completely, and totally about me.
Connecting myself to the outside world can be a bit more challenging. Frankly, there’s a lot of abstract and circumstance involved. Yet, making that connection can be huge towards finding balance, being content, and spurring creativity.
It’s easy to forget and neglect how this all ties into the interconnectivity of all. Thus, making changes to the workspace can help clear the mindspace.
Changes great and small
First, it’s vitally important to acknowledge and recognize that change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Like it or not, change can, will, and does occur. Sometimes it’s so slow and subtle that you don’t recognize it until long after its complete. Other times, it’s abrupt, sudden, and instantly disruptive. Of course, change can, will, and do happen at a pace somewhere between these extremes.
While numerous aspects of change are utterly outside of our control, many others are wholly ours to control. That can range from altering an opinion, stepping out of a room for a change of perspective and scenery, to moving your whole life somewhere far from the familiar; and everything in between.
One of the best ways to empower ourselves is to choose changes to make. From switching toothpaste to relocating, from waking up half an hour earlier to journaling regularly, and everything between these, we can choose change for our lives, great or small, to empower ourselves.
The size of the change is of no importance. What does matter is making an active, conscious choice to decide on changing something. Taking that control and directing a specific thing for change is one of the most empowering things that anyone can do for themselves. When all is said and done, it’s surprisingly easy. You just need to make a start of it.
Sometimes this entails something relatively simple but still helpful to your sense of being. Take changing your workspace to clear your mindspace, for example.
Changing your workspace to help clear your mindspace
If you’re unfamiliar with this idea, please allow me to share my own recent choices for such change.
My wife and I moved to our current apartment 6 years ago. When we moved here, I acquired some new furniture to set up a more complete, dedicated home office. This was a fairly large step, following my previous home office space. That had been a corner of our living room, partitioned with a Soji screen. Now, I have an entire room for my office space.
Once I built the 6-foot-tall bookshelves and picked the wall to put them against, then arranged where and how to place my desks, computer, and art, my office was a complete sanctuary that was a space where I would work, create, and spend most of my time on any given day.
In the 6 years since I set up this space, I’ve made a few changes. For example, I set up a small space dedicated to meditation, added some lighting, cleared and gave away some of my books, and did my best to dust, vacuum, and declutter the desks semi-regularly.
As we ended 2023, I decided I needed a change. This has been the most major change to my workspace in some time. I moved around my lighting, rearranged the art on my walls, (going so far as to remove and discard a piece), moved some furniture around, and altered several of the shelves, both by rearranging things and moving where the shelf was seated.
It might not seem like much, but the feeling of my workspace has changed. It feels more open, less cramped, and like the flow is better. The change to the walls feels fresh, especially as the piece I removed was larger than I realized.
My wife’s first comment upon entering my office, after all the changes I’ve made, was how much brighter the room feels.
Feels. That’s the key. The feeling in this space is brighter, more open, and the sense of flow is more continuous. All from removing art from a wall, rearranging other art, altering shelves and what was on them, and moving two lamps and one piece of furniture around.
Maybe this isn’t true causality, but since I made these small changes, my creative workflow has felt improved. I’ve started to take the suggestions from my beta readers to alter/edit Alliances and Consequences (Book 1 of my new Savagespace sci-fi series), begun to revisit and revise an old project for repurposing, wrote some blogs, and did some work to open new promotional channels for my existing books.
Perhaps the change to the workspace positively has impacted my mindspace. Or perhaps, in the flow of making changes, my perspective towards my work has changed. Perhaps it’s a combination of both. ) Of course, it might just be a fluke.
However, I believe, that as part of the interconnectivity of all, making changes to my external, surrounding workspace has opened my internal process and mindspace flow. By being intentional with the space where I do my work and spend the most time, I’m telling the Universe that I desire better flow inside and out.
I think sometimes exerting control on any level that we can empowers us beyond immediate effect.
Workspace and mindspace are ours to control
There is a teenager living in the room in the apartment above mine. Most days, she’s not there because she’s in school. Sometimes, however, she is unnecessarily noisy, bangs around up there doing who-knows-what, plays her music too loudly, and she makes it difficult for me to be in my office.
I have zero control over this and her. Sure, maybe I could go upstairs, knock on the door, and try asking the teenager to be more mindful that I work below her. Or perhaps I could ask her parents to better mind her. However, odds are that while things might improve from such, they might get worse. Weighing that, and that lack of control I can exert here, I’ve not bothered.
When I am in this space, whether the kid is home or not, what I can control is what I’m doing here. I can alter the music, or not play any. The lighting can be set how I prefer it, depending on the time of day and if we have sunlight, overcast, rain, or whatever else going on. I can keep my space decluttered, vacuum and dust, and generally maintain it as best suits me.
All of this is in my control. Apart from this specific space, all else that I can control is inside me. Specifically, my thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, what I am and am not doing, and so on. Apart from elements of one’s personal space, and elements of self-awareness, we can control little to nothing else in life.
Exerting control to effect is empowering. Given how few ways this can be done, it makes sense that consciously and mindfully making changes to the workspace can change the mindspace, too. I believe that’s a great way to expand on my creativity.
Thanks for reading. As I share my creative journey with you, I conclude with this: How are you inspired to be your own creator – whatever form that takes?
Please take a moment to check out the collection of my published works, which can be found here.
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