On a hike through the Beartooth wilderness, I came across a dry riverbed. The stones were perfectly rounded, shaped by thousands of years of water rushing over them. You could almost hear the ghost of the river that had once carved its way through. But the river itself was gone—it had been forced to reroute after a severe flood.
The old path was silent now, just rock and memory. Yet the river hadn’t disappeared. It had found a new course, one that cut across the landscape with as much power and persistence as before.
CREATIVE LESSON
Walking there, it struck me: creativity works the same way. When you feel blocked, it doesn’t mean the energy has vanished. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, creative energy is always trying to emerge. Sometimes, when the old trail gets shut down, the flood forces a new one open.
I’ve experienced this firsthand. A vision I thought was solid was suddenly kicked out from under me. For months, I felt stuck, unsure of where to go next. But slowly, another path began to reveal itself—different than what I had planned, but flowing with even more energy.
That’s the nature of creativity. It doesn’t die when it hits an obstacle. It reroutes. It may leave behind a bed of rounded stones as proof of what once was, but its true force is in the way it keeps moving, reshaping, and finding its way to where it belongs.
