1. What creativity is

This is an email series about creativity and movement of the body and the relationship between the two. Though I am a triathlete working on a novel, it’s not a conversation about intensity or duration so much as it is about how we become bigger, fuller, truer versions of ourselves under hostile conditions—which, to one extent or another, are the conditions of everyone. My notion of creativity locates it in adaptation: Creativity is our, sometimes incredibly surprising, capacity to gain control of the narrative, to shift the terms of whatever confrontation we’re in the middle of so that our intrinsic or cultivated advantages become decisive.

Some years ago I was suffering chronic pain from a bicycling injury, which gave rise in turn to a long and lonely season of binge eating. My therapist at the time, a middle-aged Serbian-American man whom I loved, would say: “You’re on a losing streak. Everyone has those. You’ve just got to get back on a winning streak.” He was right, and I believed him, but I thought the winning streak was going to originate in my thoughts or my will or the shape of my mind. I was mistaken. The winning streak, when it came, was a creation of my body.

Coming Friday: How to break a bone.

This is Western Coffee, a series of condensed notes on how movement and creativity fuel each other to help us become engaged, connected, progressing humans.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.