The Flaubert Frontier

How disorderly and creative can you be at the same time?

Just a short travel-size note in lieu of a full-size newsletter issue this week. I’m finally done with just over a month of nearly continuous and incoherent travel that started May 25th: Singapore, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Toronto, and Healdsburg, CA (where the pop-up village experiment Edge Esmeralda is just winding down). The travel was for 3 work projects across 2 unrelated gigs, plus a big, exhausting family function. With a reader meetup in the mix too, the first in 5 years. And with stuff on the home front to deal with remotely. It didn’t help that it was scorching summer and/or monsoon weather everywhere I went.

Strikes me I haven’t done this sort of thing… ever.

While I’ve traveled a fair amount, it’s usually been at a relaxing tempo, with a single purpose at a time, a dormant home front, and with very low introvert-grade social demands. This was 5 weeks, all at about 10x the social load I’m used to.

I started writing this note yesterday, in a cafe in San Francisco, before two meetings. Then I headed back on a (delayed) evening flight to Seattle, and am finally finishing it on my couch at home. Kinda revealing when even a short task gets split like this. I plan to park firmly at home and not travel for a few months if I can manage it. I have another month of this kind of incoherent of travel coming up in November (when I’ll turn 50), and my goal for the intervening 4 months is to simply get into better shape mentally and physically so it doesn’t run me ragged the way it did this time. Because I suspect the need for such travel is going to go up rather than down for me in the coming decade. I have aging parents in India, and shifting patterns of demand in my consulting work.

Perhaps the biggest cost of demanding travel for me is not the mental and physical toll, but the fact that it derails creative momentum, which is at the core of the virtuous cycle of motivation, satisfying accomplishment, and energy that makes mental and physical condition even worth attending to.

Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I suppose the effect of being irregular and disorderly in your life is that you end up meek and unoriginal in your work. But people much older than me seem to cheerfully handle much more demanding and incoherent travel schedules and retain their creative momentum, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. There’s a Pareto frontier here and it looks like I’m nowhere near it. Let’s call it the Flaubert frontier.

My priority over the summer is to get to that frontier. We’ll see if the “violent and original” and “irregular and disorderly” quotients can both go up. My cunning plan starts with a Rejuvenation July. I have no idea what that means but I’ll figure it out. I’m thinking of starting by quitting coffee for a couple of weeks. After that, I want to try doing this “regular and orderly thing” in a more deliberate and conscious way, to builds antifragility to the unavoidable irregular and disorderly periods.

We’ll get back to regular, orderly, violent, and original programming next week.