Channeled Creativity

I’m a habitual and organized sort, traits I wear with ease. They minimize life’s wrinkles,  give it a good look and feel and keep chaos at bay. Attempts to be otherwise would be futile. Routine and organization are the warp and weft in the fabric that makes me, me.

It’ll be no surprise then that I’ve worked out in gyms three mornings a week for over half my life. Cardio, weights, and stretching. While gravity, grey hair, crepey skin, and very-close veins, what I think they should be called, have muscled their way in, at least I’m mostly succeeding at hanging on to my girlish figure. Although the characteristic of routine is inextricably moi, it is often hard to roust myself from bed. That five a.m. alarm is heartless.

An obstacle to my long-lived routine is staving off monotony. Weights aren’t a problem. An ever changing diversity of gym members alters the scenery while I work a variety of weight machines, free weights and variations of other exercises. It’s the treadmill, the cardio portion of my workout that cried for a remedy.

Planet Fitness, my current gym, has twelve large screen TVs, each on a different channel, that span above and across the military-like formation of cardio equipment. Their intended role is to make cardio workouts – treadmill, elliptical and stationary bike – more fun, less boring, take minds off the repetitive, good-for-us, dungeon drudgery. The number of TVs sounds, deceivingly, like a healthy amount of diversity. To me it’s the epitome of TMI – the wrong kind.

Don Henley was spot on about the news media. Six news networks have an insatiable appetite for sharing the same dirty laundry stories, the same gloom and doom. At least three also dish out overstated, overly dissected, graphic laden, “most accurate” and “exclusive ten day” hyped weather forecasts. Another network’s M-O is 24/7 financial pundits reporting and speculating about the market. Sports casters on three sports-only networks replay and rehash match outcomes ad nauseam. TNT is the lone channel of the twelve that plays reruns of popular drama series that act out all the bad stuff reported on network news. They bill it as entertainment. Hallelujah for the rare occasion when sixty seconds of relief comes during the adoptive pet of the week spotlight.

You see my challenge. While I’m doing cardio which is healthy for my body, my emotional well being gets visually bombarded with stressors. My eyes flit from one screen to another looking for something inspiring. I repeatedly check to see how much time’s elapsed. I find nothing uplifting and what I do see can get me riled. I feel emotional stress building. I’ve longed for just one channel that shows only beautiful scenery, wild animals in their environment, a bird’s eye view of earth – anything that’s visually and positively stimulating. I’d plant myself on a treadmill in front of it in a heartbeat.

Sounds I’ve got a handle on. The upbeat tunes on my iPod’s gym playlist instinctively will my fingers to tapping and keep my feet moving on the treadmill but the screen on the iPod Touch is too small for me to enjoy any visual diversion I could watch on it.

I lean towards being tech-devise adverse. Besides a laptop computer and iPod Touch I own a flip phone. Period. No smart phone. No tablet. No Fitbit. No Echo Dot or Google Home. I think of it as keeping life simple. A recent GQ article indicates I’m in decent company electronics-wise. Per the article, Yvon Chouinard, the founder and overseer of the outdoor equipment and clothing company Patagonia doesn’t do email and rarely uses his phone yet Patagonia did over $800 million in sales in 2017. Even I email essentially daily although my phone’s never been used for texting and is rarely used otherwise. Nonetheless, I’m also successful in the currency of life.

One day my pining for a channel devoted to pleasant images hatched into a concept with genuine possibility. I was cautiously stoked. Fifty-five photos I’ve taken are random screen savers on my Mac laptop. A new image pops up every day. They habitually prompt a smile. Sometimes I reach out to touch the screen and feel the luscious, velvety muzzle of the closeup horse pics. The tactile sensation is palpable. My endorphin levels spike. Other days I’m transported back onto a favorite trail in Rocky Mountain National Park with Steve reliving a strenuous and satisfying hike, imbibing Colorado mountain views. I feel like I’m right back there. What if I did this on a device I could bring to Planet Fitness?

Not totally stubborn, I acquiesced to the idea of putting aside my device aversion and investing in an inexpensive tablet. The screen would be larger than my iPod Touch. If I could get enough photos loaded on it to last my typical 35 minute cardio it might be THE creative solution to my problem.   

The idea sat idle until visiting a friend in Alexandria VA. Sarah being a self-motivated, four-mile-every-morning-regardless-of-the-weather walker with her bestest beastie, four-legged companion Fergie, the topic of changing scenery came up. She has several options for routes to take to change it up.

I mentioned my need for maintaining motivation for my indoor cardio routine and plan to buy a tablet that I expected to use only for diversion while doing treadmill. I don’t think Sarah could have jumped up faster to search for one she’d used on a vacation to China bought solely for that purpose then abandoned. She found it and bequeathed it to lucky me.

I was never sure the idea of creating my own happy-image “channel” would remedy cardio monotony so being gifted a tablet was perfect. Turns out the solution was perfect as well. The Samsung tablet’s screen is four times larger than the iPod Touch. I’ve currently got 596 photos on the SD card including pics from vacations, my art, close-ups of texture, grasses, foxes, home stuff, horses and more horses – and gobs more of the things that make my heart sing.

Now while I’m on the treadmill I don’t watch the time. I find myself smiling, reliving marvelous memories, re-appreciating art I’ve created and hating to turn my “channel” off until the last second of my routine. And the seven ways I can view the photos as a slide show changes up how I see each image. Using either the Drop or Cube slide-show features truncates images in ways that give me different views to inspire new ideas for artwork composition and a new perspective on all the images.

My cardio routine now has both a good look and feel although I’m now less tech-device “lean”. Since the gym didn’t provide the type of visual distraction I needed – I made my own. The personal, creative channel I watch while on the treadmill eliminates the chaos of normal network stressors and celebrates what’s awesome in my life – a great and creative way to start my day.

Posted by carol@mylifewithcreativity.com & filed under How To. This post has 4 comments.