I came down to London yesterday for exciting One Little Spark work meetings and catch ups. Today, I had six hours free in London and woke up unsure what to do. I immediately start thinking about how to best use my time, make it count, and where would be the best place for me to focus. And then I remembered some advice I shared with my team in my last role, courtesy of Maya Angelou:

Every person needs to take one day away…Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops (1993).

And so, not following the advice exactly, I spent over four hours in the Tate Modern, walking slowly, taking to time to explore, sip coffee, listen, see, meander, and let thoughts wander. Not thinking about how long I should spend there, or what next. The only limit my booked train home.

It didn’t take me long to realise that it’s been an incredibly long time since I did something, anything, like this. A busy job and two boys means this isn’t something you even feel you have the time or headspace for. There is work to be done! But, of course, as I sit on the train home now, only a few weeks into running my own business, I feel not only rested, but excited, filled with ideas, my imagination fired up.

It seems we have reached a point, even in highly creative industries like academia, where space to let our imaginations flourish, our minds reset, is seen as costly and unproductive. There are, after all, emails to answered. But there are always emails to be answered. And as novelist, gamewriter, and TV producer Naomi Alderman says:

You can’t be the best person in the world at answering your email on time and being available for every request and also write good books. (2019)

As I move forward with my new self-employed journey, I am starting to think deeply about what work matters to me and how I might want to work. Time to create, reflect, and imagine is to be a priority.

Three works left significant impressions today. The first was Alberto Giacometti’s Femme debout / Standing women (1964) of which novelist and playwrite Jean Genet said: ‘the resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others’. And the second, perhaps in contrast, Richard Long’s Red Slate Circle (1988). For Long, ‘every stone is different, one form another, in the same way all fingerprints, or snowflakes, or places are unique, so no two circles can be alike’.

Images of works by Giacometti and Long

Finally, there was Cildo Meireles’ Babel (2001) described as a tower of incomprehension reflected information overload and failed communication.

Description: A tall, tower-like sculpture made of hundreds of radios stacked in a tapering cylindrical form. Each radio is switched on, tuned to different stations, producing a layered, chaotic sound of overlapping voices and music that fills the gallery space.

So let’s all try to take a day (or half a day, or a few hours). Take time to listen to ourselves and others, to create space for rest and thought because, with that, comes imagination, ideas, and change. Now, like most people I don’t usually have the TATE MODERN on my doorstep, so over the next few months I’ll share how we might also create that space at home, in the park, and even online.

Ensuring we occasionally take time away from the day-to-day could be the most meaningful, most productive, and most valuable thing we can do.