WTL Issue 010 | October 22, 2025 |
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Lighting Strikes in Quiet Spaces
Lessons from the Long Haul
The Panamanian hammock stretched between two birch trees like a rainbow cradle, its hand-tied rope squares creating a webbed pattern against the endless Alaska daylight. My legs tangled with the warm summer air, sticky fingers gripping the worn spine of a Beverly Cleary novel. Below me, black birch roots twisted through the dirt and discarded popsicle sticks, the whole world swaying gently as I disappeared into Ramona Quimby's adventures.
Those Interior Alaska summers moved with the rhythm of midnight sun and library visits. Every Tuesday, we'd replenish our towering stack of books, logging progress on the summer reading challenge. Between chapters, I'd emerge blinking into the brightness, pedaling my electric blue bike with its banana seat down Aurora Drive, handlebars catching the light like antennae reaching for something just beyond.
Even now, 15 years into climate work, my best insights still arrive the same way—when I step away from the digital hum. Whether I'm following a forest trail or losing myself in pages that smell of paper and possibility, the solutions I've been chasing often surface in that quiet space between seeking and receiving.
Elizabeth Gilbert captured this beautifully in Big Magic when she wrote about ideas as "alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator...that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does)."
In climate work, we're often so focused on the urgency—the reports, the deadlines, the endless Zoom windows—that we forget to create space for lightning to strike. But the most transformative climate solutions I've witnessed didn't emerge from more data analysis or back-to-back meetings. They came when someone stepped away from their desk, let their mind wander, and became available to ideas that were already seeking expression.
Field-Tested: The Weekly Creative Reset
When you're managing complex climate initiatives, taking time for creative practice can feel indulgent. But I've learned that regular creative engagement isn't luxury—it's infrastructure for sustainable innovation.
The practice: Block 1-2 hours every week for hands-on creative work that has nothing directly to do with your current climate projects. Set a recurring calendar reminder titled "Creative Reset" and protect that time like any other critical presentation or meeting.
Choose your medium:
- Visual arts: Try watercolor painting of whatever catches your eye, or visit a local art installation and let yourself get lost in the colors and forms without analyzing meaning
- Creative writing: Start with ten minutes of freeform handwriting about a childhood memory, then follow whatever stories want to emerge on the page
- Movement-based: Practice the French art of flâner (leisurely wandering without purpose or destination) or learn a new dance style that requires your full attention to rhythm and movement
The climate connection: After each creative session, spend five minutes noting any unexpected insights about your current projects. Often, the solutions that emerge have nothing to do with what you were creating, but everything to do with the mental space you've opened.
Real example: I was once in a room with 200+ people using LEGO Serious Play methodology to tackle how to activate financial independence in the $100B Indigenous economy in Canada. We added colored blocks to one another's builds, narrating systems and pathways for broader financial access. By building together on shared baseplates, perspectives aligned in ways that traditional discussion never achieved. I left believing these solutions were possible because we'd constructed a foundation of understanding with our hands.
The goal isn't to produce art worthy of exhibition—it's to maintain neural pathways that connect logic with intuition, data with wisdom, urgency with spaciousness.
Signals & Shifts
The neuroscience of creative restoration: Cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer's research shows that backpackers performed 50% better on creativity tests after four days in nature. The key is "soft fascination". This is when natural stimuli like rustling leaves gently capture attention, freeing the mind to wander and access creative insights. This is what many of us intuitively know: breakthrough thinking often emerges when we step away from screens. Learn more
The poetry of climate action: "There is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it." Watch Amanda Gorman deliver these words at President Biden's inauguration and notice how poetry can carry climate hope in ways that data alone cannot. More climate leaders are integrating storytelling and artistic expression into policy work, recognizing that transformation happens as much through imagination as through regulation.
Question for reflection: When did you last experience a breakthrough insight about your climate work? What conditions created that moment of clarity?
Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.
Nikoosh
Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.
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