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Standing in the shower, thinking

A few weeks ago, I drafted a blog post for work. I wasn’t sure about the tone or the message, and since I wasn’t confident about posting it, I decided to put it aside for a bit while I took a few minutes to grab a shower: the one thing in my day that I always forget to plan for.

I used to be a shower-first-thing person. My whole life I’ve rolled out of bed and gone straight to the shower, before even getting coffee. It was as regular a ritual for me as reading before bed.

When I started using a tread desk, that habit changed. I walk every morning for four hours while I work. I sweat.

I don’t take a shower first thing now since I know I’ll spend the morning sweating. The problem is now my shower doesn’t have a designated slot in the day. Every day is different, and being a routine-driven person, the lack of regularity throws me completely. After 35 years of showering first thing in the morning, now, every single day, I realize at some point, “Oh crap, when am I going to fit my shower in?” This is my personal occupational hazard of working from home.

On this particular day, when I wasn’t sure about the internal blog post I was to publish, stepping away from it seemed the perfect time to squeeze in my unplanned-for shower.

In the shower, I enter fully into the inner world of thought. I’ve written before about how the shower is like a fairy forest: I step in, and time warps. In the steam, the white noise of droplets clattering on the tub, the warm water on my skin, I immerse so totally in day dreams, time and space become irrelevant. I forget whether I’ve already washed my hair. I have to check the dryness of the washcloth to determine if I’ve already washed my body. I don’t know if 5 or 30 minutes have passed.

The shower is my thinking place. I don’t intentionally go there to think — our water bill would be outrageous — it just happens. Sometimes I think about cats. Sometimes I think about the grocery list. Sometimes I think about space. Sometimes I have no recollection of what I’ve thought about.

Sometimes I have breakthroughs.

I have another thinking place, and that is in a notebook, in the world of words. I write to discover what I’m thinking, to find holes and explore how to fill them. Strangely, though, I do not want my two thinking places — the shower and the notebook — to overlap. I don’t want a whiteboard in my shower. I don’t want a waterproof phone to capture aha moments.

The beauty of the shower as a thinking place is that the thoughts are uninterrupted. I am out of the way of them because I am usually unaware they are even happening. Writing would break that. It would stop the thoughts, it would disrupt their momentum. The physical act of writing would attach them and make them stick in a place where I am literally washing myself clean and trying to unstick things.

That day, on my unexpected trip to the shower, with no intention to change my thoughts or think about my blog post, and with only the intention of squeezing in a shower so I would not forget to clean myself before taking my daughter to swim practice in the evening, I took my shower and ended up thinking about the blog post. I thought about the tone, I thought about ways to make it more collaborative, and I thought about ways to improve.

When I emerged, I knew the edits I would make so I could feel good about publishing the piece. My showers aren’t always so productive, but I’m finding more and more that this disruptive showering in the middle of the day is working for me. Even if, as a structured, routine-oriented person, the chaos makes me crazy.

This is my entry for the Support Driven Week 3 writing challenge: Thinking space.

13 thoughts on “Standing in the shower, thinking”

  3. > Sometimes I have breakthroughs.

    Same here! The other day I mentally wrote a whole speech but then forgot about it. So now what I do is, when I sense some good ideas for something like a post, I make a mental plan so I at least keep in mind the outline. 🙂

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  5. It’s so ironic. The ‘interruption’ becomes a key part of the process. I’m the same way. Loathe to stop, even though my experience says it would be more than Very Good to take time out! 🙂

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  6. I also work from home and regularly experience this shower conundrum and have yet to figure out the best solution. For me, though, it’s kind if ideal because I loathe routine, even though a degree of it is essential for accomplishing my goals. As I was reading this I thought of the book Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin about habits and how different people/personality types establish and keeps habits. Hmmm, perhaps I’ll revisit it. It sounds like you’ve found what works for you. I loved reading this!

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  7. Hi Andrea!
    This post inspires me, and makes me want to shower myself!
    Have you already read _Your Creative Brain_ by Shelley Carson? She is a psychology professor at Harvard whose workshop I attended last year at the writing conference that inspired my blog. She talked about the ‘defocused’ mindstate that often occurs in the shower. It also happens after exercise, first thing in the morning maybe while driving… It’s where ideas processed in the subconscious rise to conscious awareness–the a-ha moments. She says we can actually see them on EEG–a spike in gamma waves in a certain area of the brain, within 30 seconds before the a-ha event! Or that’s how I remember what she said–I have yet to read the book. 😉 Inspire on! 😀

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  8. I find stepping away from something you are writing – whether for work or for pleasure – provides invaluable perspective. My half-hour on the elliptical often gives me that. Sometimes the shower too. Could not imagine working on a treadmill desk, though. Do you keep to a slow pace or actually work up a sweat? How do you stay steady enough to type properly?

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    1. I was really nervous about using a tread desk for the exact reasons you mention — would I actually be able to type and walk at the same time? I put off the decision for several months, but colleagues kept telling me it would only take a day or two to get used to it. So I finally got one, and they were right — it took about half a day for me to get accustomed to typing and walking at the same time. Now I don’t notice that I’m walking at all. I forget I am until I get on a video hangout and see my head bobbing, and there are some types of work I do, like live chat support, that I’m almost dependent on the walking because live chat is active, energetic work, and walking while I’m doing it keeps my energy high.

      I walk at a pace of 2.4 mph. I don’t know why I haven’t bumped that final 0.1 mph :-D. My first year I walked at 2.0 mph, and then I increased the speed when I realized I could. I do sweat — not profusely, but enough that I want to take a shower afterwards. It’s really great though because I used to always be cold while I worked. I’d sit in a chair all day and shiver, even if I was covered in blankets. The activity of walking keeps my blood flowing and keeps me warm. I love it 🙂

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  9. it is amazing how that works. I think that in our crazy world it is the one place where we can be with just ourselves and there is no one to tell you how to do it

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