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3 • Involvement and Withdrawal

Involvement, in the creative sense, means to become completely absorbed in what is being done. Withdrawal, on the other hand, means a voluntary stepping back, or retirement, that is temporary in nature. These two mental processes are also alternating.

The creative mind must not only participate in the job of creating, but it must also reserve at least a part of its attention to being a spectator. Neither of these two acts can be allowed to suffer at the expense of the other. What actually happens is that the mind keeps shifting continually back and forth between the two. An analogy is the way an artist puts a daub of paint on his canvas, and then steps back to get a long-range view of the effect of the daub on the canvas as a whole.

The value of this procedure is to make your traveling over unknown paths easier: the "withdrawn" self steps out for a look at the road ahead that the "involved" self will soon be following. In this way, it tries to avoid bumps, ruts, blind alleys, and other traps that can dissipate both time and energy. During the time that your mind is actually involved in the problem, you will probably be much too busy smoothing out bumps and filling in ruts to pay much attention to the road ahead. Then, when you have made sufficient progress, or when you hit a really bad chuck-hole, you again withdraw from the problem, look to see what you have accomplished, and estimate what remains to be done. Therefore, the creative "flow" of mental effort is not usually continu­ous or in one direction. Rather, it is pulsating—moving forward in surges and pauses, but always in a forward direction.

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